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Nonsense, She Wrote

dissecting stories - badly

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Middle-age writers shouldn’t try to guess what ‘bae’ means

Book ReviewsThriller

Review: Dear Amy

written by M. J. Magee

The breakaway success of Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train – and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl before it – seems to have sent publishers scrabbling through their slush piles, snatching up any story with a suitably dodgy narrator they can shove onto the bandwagon.

Just as Stephenie Meyer launched a thousand supernatural YA novels, just as E. L. James launched… whatever she launched, Hawkins has crammed the shelves full of unreliable narrators, women who don’t want to go into their shady pasts or tell us what they’re taking all that medication for.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (It’s hard to argue you shouldn’t be publishing books people clearly want to read, after all.) Just because one author has hit success with a certain thought or theme or gimmick doesn’t mean another writer can’t riff off the idea to come up with something new and interesting.

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Review: Dear Amy was last modified: February 26th, 2017 by M. J. Magee

Who writes this nonsense?

Who writes this nonsense?

It's me. Mell. I do. Hello.

I love stories. Books, films, comics, particularly indepth board games, inappropriate anecdotes overheard at the chemist - I love them all.
And I love writing stories.
Which isn't the same as being good at it.
But analysing what makes a story seems as good a way to learn as any.
Join me as I inexpertly insult famed and published authors, and work out how to write something that's not just nonsense.

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