Charlotte Lit’s Blog

Welcome to Charlotte Lit’s literary arts blog. What you’ll find here: craft essays, book reviews, previews of literary arts events, and anything else that catches our attention.

You Are Your Book’s Best Seller

by Kathy Izard Many aspiring authors claim to despise marketing. They just want to work on their craft and write a great book, and hope that will be enough to make it hit the bestseller list. They spend years taking writing classes, searching for an agent, and working on a book contract thinking that someday, someone else […]

How to Write About Sex

by Sarah Creech Good sex in fiction relies on powerful description skills, but what makes it “good” has much more to do with character and conflict than the sensory experience of sex on the page as mere titillation. Sex is always a power dynamic in story with various parties claiming power by different methods and […]

Why “The Iliad” Still Matters

by Jeffrey Thomson The Iliad is a book of transitions; it is a fundamentally a book of liminal moments. This is a story from the basement of history—from the moment when we began the movement from an oral storytelling culture to a culture of written literature. It establishes many of the characters and tropes of the modern […]

Writing Interiority

by Dustin M. Hoffman Occasionally, I get jealous of other artistic mediums. All we have to tell our stories are these words on the page, black ink on a white page. This can seem like a disadvantage when looking at the explosive, varied forms of expression the other mediums wield. Sadly, we just won’t be […]