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.

Paula Martinac

Dialogue Versus Conversation

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When I began my career as a fiction writer, my peers sometimes praised my “good ear” for dialogue. After publishing three novels, I gravitated to screenwriting and playwriting, and the shifts in form taught me that a good ear alone isn’t enough to craft believable dialogue. Being attuned to cadence and verbal tics is a […]

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Charlotte Lit Admin

Book Recommendations from Our Members

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At our 2020 holiday party, we asked our members what books they’d recommend as gifts or for next year’s book clubs. Here’s the list, with purchase links to our friends Park Road Books. Enjoy! Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich | Hardcover | Paperback The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow […]

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Paul Reali

Pen to Paper Prompt: Choice

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Election day is a good day to think about choice. Writing is all choice. The writer chooses, over and over again, from the vast catalog of everything. Some of the choices a writer makes include: • Who’s telling the story: narrator or narrators • Who else is in the story: supporting character or characters • Who are […]

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David Radavich

The Intimate Kinship of Genres

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During this period of hyper-consciousness about genres and subgenres, bookstores, Amazon, and agents encourage us to think of “boxes” into which our writing can be put for purposes of marketing. Not surprisingly, we pay close attention to relatively small distinctions between intersecting forms of literature. What makes for a young adult novel—a teenage protagonist?  How do […]

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