What Sofa Would Your Writing Project Be If It Were a Sofa?

Share
  • September 13, 2019

Beloved slipstream writer Kelly Link has been publicly wrestling with a novel on Twitter for a while now (sample tweet: “gonna travel back in time and stop the baby who grew up to invent novels”). Link definitely knows what she’s doing when it comes to short stories—she’s gotten a MacArthur fellowship and one of her collections was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—but a novel is a whole other kind of animal. Or maybe a whole other kind of furniture?

Yesterday Link posted a metaphor about the Novel Problem that evoked the bit in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency where the couch gets inextricably wedged in a stairwell in a way that’s not possible according to physics:

As a coda, she encouraged followers to describe their own writing projects in terms of sofas. The result is a charming tour through the discount furniture showroom of writerly despair and hope.

“I am truly excited about these descriptions and would sit on every one while I continue to work on my novel,” Link told Electric Lit. We couldn’t agree more, although it might be challenging getting up into that tree.

The post What Sofa Would Your Writing Project Be If It Were a Sofa? appeared first on Electric Literature.

Source : What Sofa Would Your Writing Project Be If It Were a Sofa?