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August, 1974

I was eighteen years old the summer Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. I was between my freshman and sophomore years of college, and I worked as a sales clerk at Sherman’s Department Store in Olney, Illinois. Each afternoon around three o’clock, my manager sent me to the drug store across the street to buy him a pack of cigarettes (Kent Deluxe 100s) and an afternoon newspaper. I brought the cigarettes and the paper and his change back to him, and then I went on about the business of straightening stacks of sport shirts and trousers, whisking a feather duster over [...]

By |2019-11-18T07:24:33-05:00November 18th, 2019|Blog|6 Comments
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Urgent Motivation: Putting Your Characters into Motion

Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, Olive, Again, begins like this: In the early afternoon on a Saturday in June, Jack Kennison put on his sunglasses, got into his sports car with the top down, strapped the seatbelt over his shoulder and across his large stomach, and drove to Portland—almost an hour away—to buy a gallon of whiskey rather than bump into Olive Kitteridge at the grocery store here in Crosby, Maine. Or even that other woman he had seen twice in the store as he stood holding his whiskey while she talked about the weather. The weather. That woman—he could not [...]

By |2019-11-11T07:49:34-05:00November 11th, 2019|Blog|0 Comments
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One Fine Morning: Rededicating Ourselves to the Craft

I hope by now you’ve turned back your clocks an hour and enjoyed your extra sleep. Here in central Ohio, it’s a beautiful sunny day—a little on the cool side, but, hey, it’s November. Let’s enjoy the sun and not think about the fact that it’ll set at 5:27 pm. Yes, we’re making our final turn toward the cold and dark of winter, but instead of despairing, let’s give thanks for the reminder it gives us that time is short and pages don’t write themselves. Let’s use this time change to rededicate ourselves to time spent on improving our craft. [...]

By |2019-11-04T07:46:50-05:00November 4th, 2019|Blog|4 Comments
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Leaps, Associations, and Connections

It starts, as so many stories do, with a bottle of bourbon. The brand is Angels Envy, and our friend Deni says it should be the title of a poem. We know, by the end of the night, our other friend Roy will write it. For the time, though, as we sit around a table in Roy and Gloria’s kitchen with Sherry, and Deni and her husband Mark, and my wife Cathy, we tell stories. It’s a rainy autumn afternoon, a perfect day for bourbon and stories and the talk talked between old friends. Roy tells a story of youthful [...]

By |2019-10-28T09:26:36-05:00October 28th, 2019|Blog|2 Comments
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Giving a Memoir Resonance

Facts alone do not a memoir make. First this happened, then this happened, then this happened. A sequence of memories is easy enough for anyone to recall from a particular period of time in his or her life. It may even be easy to see the causal links between the events on a timeline. Because this happened, this next thing happened, and on and on. Sometimes, though, events in a life can be random. This is one difference between the narrative of a memoir and that of a novel. In a novel, events usually connect. In life, the oddest things [...]

By |2019-10-21T08:36:47-05:00October 21st, 2019|Blog|3 Comments
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Staying with Our Characters in Their Present Moments

We’re in the midst of autumn here in central Ohio. It won’t be long before I’ll be pulling up the tomato plants and putting the patio furniture in the basement or the garage. I’ll leave the large table and cover it for winter. In the cold months to come, I’ll stand at a back window and watch snow pile up on that cover. Only a few evergreens will provide a touch of color in the landscaping. But for now, there are still tomatoes to pick and there are hydrangeas still in bloom. In a little while from the time I’m [...]

By |2019-10-14T08:11:55-05:00October 14th, 2019|Uncategorized|0 Comments
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A Day in the Life of a Writer Who Also Teaches

For those of us who write novels, at least from my perspective, it’s important to live in the world of the novel with some degree of consistency while the writing is underway. Leaving the writing for stretches of time makes it hard to sustain the momentum that writing long form narratives requires. When you teach, as I do, and when you relish the challenge of teaching young writers how to improve their craft, and when you get addicted to the verve and energy the writing workshop creates, it can become a delicate negotiation between the time spent on the two [...]

By |2019-10-07T07:24:11-05:00October 7th, 2019|Blog, Uncategorized|2 Comments
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Two Stories at Once: Finding the Resonant Truths

Technique? I can teach that in a writing workshop. What’s tougher to teach—really, I can only extend an invitation—is the ability to think and to feel in terms of opposites, to know, as Thomas Mann said, “A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.” If you’re paying attention, life will teach you that. My father was a gruff man, a man of temper. During my rebellious teenage years, we clashed. We said vile things. Sometimes we shoved at each other. My kind and timid mother endured it all. She didn’t deserve the ugliness we brought into [...]

By |2019-09-30T07:27:10-05:00September 30th, 2019|Blog|6 Comments
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What Would You Do?

A week or so ago, in those idle few minutes before I was to leave my office to teach a workshop. I picked up my copy of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and reacquainted myself with “On the Rainy River.” Is it a short story, an essay, or something else? The question is irrelevant because, no matter what we call it, we’re left with the same narrative, the story of a young boy named Tim O’Brien, who, after being drafted during the Vietnam War, drives north in Minnesota as far as he can before getting a cabin at the [...]

By |2019-09-23T08:20:42-05:00September 23rd, 2019|Uncategorized|2 Comments
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What Were They Thinking?

As fiction writers, we make decisions about how close we want the reader to be to our main characters’ thoughts. Sometimes the point of view is very distant as it is when we’re reporting our characters’ actions or their histories or describing their landscapes. Take, for example, the opening lines of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”: The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. . . . The American and the girl with him [...]

By |2019-09-16T07:12:15-05:00September 16th, 2019|Blog|2 Comments
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