An Exclusive Preview of NOVEL ADVICE
Thank you for signing up to explore some Fabulist Rabbit Holes. We’re now about four weeks out from the release of my book "NOVEL ADVICE: Practical Wisdom for Your Favorite Literary Characters."
The book is a collection of letters by characters from across literature writing for advice about their fictional dilemmas. But they’re not writing to just any old agony aunt, but to an advisor uniquely positioned to understand their situations: “Aunt Antigone.”
“…it’s hard to be a fictional character. Everything you do is in support of some master narrative. All of your choices are constrained by the story, genre, form, and the particular skills (or lack thereof ) of the storyteller. And whatever you do, your choices are judged, analyzed, mocked, and questioned by readers and critics who just can’t wait to catalog your myriad flaws and failures. But just because readers and writers may know how the stories end doesn’t mean that the characters do. While they’re in the middle, they have no idea if they’re in a comedy or a tragedy, an epic or fable or farce. Are they the hero or the villain, the love interest or the comic sidekick? It doesn’t seem quite fair, does it?” — Aunt Antigone
As a thank you for signing up for this newsletter, I’ve put together a sneak preview of the book, a few choice excerpts in which you get to meet Aunt Antigone and see how she tries to solve three very different literary dilemmas.
Let me know what you think of Aunt Antigone’s advice. Do you agree? Is she off-base? What would you tell them instead?