You can probably power through all of these great short-short stories in one long bathroom break — Flash fiction is many things: hilariously difficult to categorize; confusingly known as “microfiction,” “short shorts,” “minisagas,” “dribble,” and “drabble”; and sometimes, even dangerous. But great might not be the first word that springs to mind. Remember, this is a style of writing so short (most cap it at 1,000 words)…

What’s your “Eat, Pray, Love”? We’ve made it easy to find out — Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love sold more than ten million copies and was made into a movie starring Julia Roberts: in other words, basically the ultimate dream of anyone who writes a memoir. Publishing can be unpredictable, and it’s hard to know which stories are going to take off, but…

Who will survive, and what will be left of them? We’ve got an easy way to figure it out — After Children of Men, The Hunger Games, The Passage, Station Eleven, the Maddaddam trilogy, Fury Road, and the upcoming Severance, are you getting post-apocalyptic story fatigue? NO YOU ARE NOT, because survivors eking out a living (or going absolutely to pieces) in the face of a world-shattering disaster is a…

Don’t waste time trying to figure out how to write about your boobs—let this generator do it for you — The “describe yourself like a male author would” Twitter thread perfectly lampooned the worst habits of male novelists writing female characters. But it also required you to envision yourself as either a brainless sex object or a valueless nonentity, since those views of women are in fact the habits in…

The challenge is a fierce indictment of what happens when you try to write a character you don’t respect or understand — O n an unnamed part of the internet, young adult author Gwen C. Katz found a delightfully deluded male author claiming that his facility with writing natural women characters constituted an unassailable rebuke to the idea that we need diverse authors to write diverse viewpoints. If a male author can…

Feeling stuck? We help you skip the writing and go straight to the press release — The most important part of a novel isn’t the plot, the characters, or the language. It’s the elevator pitch. That one-sentence descriptor is how you sell the book to publishers, readers, and big Hollywood producers willing to shell out megabucks. But how do you generate a killer pitch—especially when you…

Let’s celebrate just a few of the amazing authors the president says he wouldn’t want in the U.S. — According to The Washington Post, our stable genius president complained in a meeting that the U.S. is admitting too many people from “shithole countries.” At issue were visas granted to immigrants from African nations and countries designated as “temporary protected status,” including Haiti and El Salvador. “Why are we having…

We polled staff and contributors to find our favorite fiction books of the year — What with the impending demise of net neutrality and social media turning into a toxic snake pit, you’re going to want to be spending a lot more time curled up with a book. Celebrate the end of a lousy year and the start of a probably lousier one by picking…

We polled staff and contributors to pick our favorite short fiction of the year — W e love short stories around here. We publish one every week in Recommended Reading, and our highest-traffic piece this year was an essay about a short story (more on this later, when we go through Electric Lit’s top stories of 2017!). And we’re not alone in this, either—after all…