More on those Hollywood novelists

A few days ago I blogged the LA Times story about idle Hollywood scriptwriters getting a chance to write that novel they've been meaning to. Novelist and writing teacher Alexander Chee -- whose early work I published in Frighten the Horses -- noticed the same story and says to the "rookie" novelists, "As a literary writer, I just want to tell my newly-arrived television and film siblings, with confidence, people don't want baggy receptacles of story. The biggest mistake, time and again, that I see student writers (or professional ones) make is to think that in a novel 'there's so much time.' There isn't."

In any case, the writers strike might be on the verge of being settled, hopefully long before those scriptwriters made much progress on their novels.