IN THE ABSENCE OF

Against the Workshop

Adam O'Fallon Price — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 13:31:19 GMT

It was nearly ten years into my teaching career before I asked myself why I was running writing workshops in my fiction classes. Averaging a three-three workload, that means I led somewhere around fifty workshops before wondering why I was doing workshops in the first place. For the uninitiated, the workshop model—which became popular and codified post-…

Solved Genres

Adam O'Fallon Price — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:03:25 GMT

It took me until I was middle-aged to realize that I am a horror movie fan. It wasn’t something I was conscious of being the case—I simply tended, over the years, to opt for horror films when I had the chance to watch a movie, and by the time I was in my forties, I was pretty conversant with the genre. I can give you an all-time scariest movie list off …

How to Write Smart Characters

Adam O'Fallon Price — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:43:09 GMT

A central paradox in good writing is what I think of as the Self-Awareness Problem. Two things usually have to simultaneously be true for a character to be dynamic and compelling.

They need to lack some degree of self-awareness and/or misunderstand themselves in some way
They still need to be onto themselves

Let me break down these two seemingly contradict…

Against Genre

Adam O'Fallon Price — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:35:53 GMT

On the first day of my fiction writing classes, I devote a few minutes to laying out a prohibition that students almost uniformly hate. It is this: in my class, you are not allowed to write genre fiction. By genre, I mean, roughly, “anything that falls outside of the commonly accepted parameters of ‘literary fiction.’” And by “literary fiction” what I m…

The Rise of the Machines

Adam O'Fallon Price — Fri, 22 May 2026 19:54:32 GMT

Hello, and a quick preamble:

First of all, as implied by the fact of this email, I am relaunching IN THE ABSENCE OF, a Substack devoted mostly to matters of writing craft, that will come out once every three weeks on Friday. My hope is that it feels like an interesting little thing at the outset of your weekend. But if it just feels like one more loathso…

Crossroads

Adam O'Fallon Price — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 17:28:44 GMT

Today I’m writing to you about Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads, a novel that I read two months ago and that was published in 2021. This is not in any sense a timely essay, but that’s the thing about books: you read them when you read them. I think of a quote by the great Black Francis/Frank Black, in an interview in which he talked about listening to old …

The Enchanted City

Adam O'Fallon Price — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 15:38:44 GMT

As many people (nerds) do, in late December/early January, I reflexively look back on what I’ve read the previous year, and I think about what I might read the forthcoming year. For the last two years, this exercise has been easy—the answer, in either direction, was Iris Murdoch.

Like a stubborn fever that refuses to break, and perhaps indicates more ser…

The Boys Are Back in Town

Adam O'Fallon Price — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 18:45:40 GMT

For the inaugural installment of IN THE ABSENCE OF, I want to do a close-reading of one of the stranger lyrics in rock history: Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town.” Note that, in keeping with the general vibe of this substack, this has no special peg, is apropos of nothing—which, come to think of it, would have been a good title for this substack. …