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I have a new story about climbing and heartbreak up in the new issue of Cutleaf cutleafjournal.com/fiction/ascent/
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Charles Dodd White
2.9K posts
Charles Dodd White
@DodddWhite
Writer and community college teacher. Marine vet. Next novel, THE WORLD ITSELF (Regal House 2027).
Knoxville, TN Katılım Haziran 2020
619 Takip Edilen808 Takipçiler
@alicewriterland Hi, Alice. Just writing to let you know someone may be spoofing your email and contacting writers pretending to be you. I received a message this morning.
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Readers, I love you! Thanks to you, MY HUSBAND’S WIFE has spent three weeks on the Sunday Times Bestseller list & it is the stuff of dreams! The special edition with sprayed edges is now only £8.48 on Amazon (while stocks last) if you fancy a beautiful book for your shelves! 🖤
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@DodddWhite Let them be offended. Its excellent when people proudly display their ignorance and arrogance, it shows the rest of us who to avoid
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Some people don't like my blunt tone, but saying you need to read regularly in order to write isn't elitism or gatekeeping or whatnot. You're building bridges. You're paying respect to those fighting the good fight, past and present. You're proving books can matter.
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@enduringscreens Doesn't his argument eat itself? Has to be paid for pleasure. 😆
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People are getting on the timeline and voluntarily saying "I never read a novel until after I had written my own." So far as I can tell, uncoerced
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@Renaterra_zas I solve many of my writing problems running trail.
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@DodddWhite This discussion it’s so unreal. I have a full time job with a lot of traveling, I do trail running (I’m awful fut train hard), and I still get to read between 40 to 50 books.
I can’t imagine writhing and being unable to read for pleasure.
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I want to point out that reading 2 books a month is not the unscalable Everest some aspiring writers are making it out to be. If you care about being good, that's an easy threshold to cross.
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@AmericanGwyn There's a pretty good documentary on Tim OBrien called The War and Peace of Tim OBrien on Tubi right now.
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Ready to move on. If you’re an aspiring fiction writer and looking for books to help develop your craft, here’s a short list of works I’ve found tremendously helpful in terms of technique. Also, I’ve made some brief comments on what can be gleaned from each.
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@FirstOrderPixie I gave what I thought was an entirely reachable number.
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@DodddWhite I might have agreed with the outraged folks about the pretentiousness of putting a definitive number on reading counts but then I saw you were advocating for 25 and it’s such a tiny small amount for a year I can’t take them seriously at all 😭
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@NewPopLit @AmericanGwyn Read Martin Eden by London. He was an absolutely voracious reader. He read far more than 25 a year.
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@DodddWhite @AmericanGwyn Reading is important, but AS important for the novelist is life experience. Direct experience. I doubt Melville was reading 25 novels a year when he was working aboard ships, or that Jack London was when he was in the Yukon.
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Since I'm amazed that what @AmericanGwyn said about reading novels is now considered controversial, I'll add that if you're not reading 25 or more novels a year, you're not going to be writing fiction anyone with a modicum of intelligence will ever want to read.
Aaron Gwyn@AmericanGwyn
My post is about people who don’t read wanting to become novelists. You co-authored a book about parenting—a perfectly legitimate thing to do—but that’s not what we’re talking about here. (Also, we both have the same publisher and I’m not contractually allowed to say much more).
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@DodddWhite If you are reading simply because you think it’s necessary to become a better writer, you likely also aren’t getting what’s actually needed out of the process to inform your writing.
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@charlesdoddwhite/note/p-188625894" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@charlesdoddwh…
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Just put this post up about reading at that other place. Link in the comments.
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@joeljmiller Because it is absolutely absurd. Also, you're a beast!
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@DodddWhite I read 114 books last year. I’m an executive in a small company, have five kids, and write two posts a week for my newsletter. The idea that someone can’t read two books a month seems absurd.
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@notwilltoledo @AmericanGwyn 25 is the baseline, buy 50 would be better obviously. I usually can only get to 40-45 myself and feel guilty about the shortfall!
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@DodddWhite @AmericanGwyn Stephen King isn’t my favorite writer but his On Writing is solid and he recommends like 50! I’m a songwriter and I don’t think you can even do that well on less than a book a month
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@DodddWhite @AmericanGwyn I’m not disagreeing but it doesn’t feel like @AmericanGwyn is in the best position to argue this point. As per Amazon, none of his books seem to have sold any substantial number. I’d be more interested in how many books a Frieda McFadden, for example, reads.
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@AmericanGwyn @stevenpoole It's wild to go viral on something that literally every writer I know has said.
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"not everyone can read [...] and some of those people are writers" — oh dear yes, as a book reviewer i can very much confirm
Aaron Gwyn@AmericanGwyn
If I spent an entire week crafting a reply that would prove the point I was making in my original post, I wouldn’t come up with anything half this good. It takes TALENT to be this ridiculous. “Encouraging writers to read is ableist.” Remarkable. Truly remarkable.
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@pr574168983635 @AmericanGwyn This used to be a truism.
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@DodddWhite @AmericanGwyn I'm completely flabbergasted this is somehow controversial. It's hard to write any literature of merit if you haven't read probably 2,000 major canonical works and a lot else besides.
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@G_S_Richter @AmericanGwyn Gonna take a really long time.
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@DodddWhite @AmericanGwyn What if you read only one per year twenty five times. (Sorry for the math.)
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@pourfairelevide They're doing fine work. NORTH SUN was a lot of fun.
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some personal news. this week I’m starting work at the greatest indie press in America.
I still cannot believe it’s my job now to tell you all about these incredible books
Deep Vellum@DeepVellum
We're so excited to welcome Jon Repetti to Deep Vellum as our new Marketing Director! Jon is a book marketer and literary critic whose work has appeared in LARB, Cleveland Review of Books, Review31, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in English from Princeton and grew up in NYC.
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