Tag: Sharp Objects

Writer’s Desk: Write the Book You’re Supposed to Write

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

When Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn was trying to write her very great, very creepy novel Dark Places, she was having trouble with the heroine, who she initially wanted to seem different than her earlier protagonists. According to this article from Fast Company, Flynn showed some pages to her husband. He read them, poured her some wine, and said, “you can tell you don’t like her, and you don’t like writing her.”

Per Flynn:

It was a very good lesson, which is: don’t let the outside voices tell you what you should be writing. You’ve got to write the book that you’re supposed to be writing, not write the book that you think people will want to read or the book that will sell better or the book that the critics will like more.

New in Books: ‘Gone Girl’

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

Gillian Flynn’s sly and rippingly suspenseful novel, Gone Girl, is one of those novels it’s hard not to try and shanghai other people into reading, as in immediately. Flynn (Sharp Objects, Dark Places) lays down a vivid and plainspoken narrative that can read like the most jet-fueled of airport thrillers but is still bejeweled with sparkling asides and dead-on commentary. Her writing is, as needed, funny, perceptive, headslappingly honest, or sometimes an amalgam of the three. That this all happens in a book whose plot seems at first ripped from a Dateline true crime episode is all the more impressive…

Gone Girl is on sale everywhere now. My full review is at PopMatters.

Also: the film rights have already been sold.