Contradictory Layers: A Writing Exercise
Characters are interesting when they’re made up of contradictions. It’s those contradictions and the writers who recognize them that create the most memorable characters in works of fiction and nonfiction. If we give our characters’ free will—if we don’t fully know them too soon—they can take us to some interesting places that can either illuminate…
Read MoreThe Obsessive Narrator
I’ve been posting the last couple of weeks about the reflective first-person narrator who looks back upon experience from a greater and wiser perspective. Today, I’d like to talk about the first-person narrator who isn’t very wise or perceptive through most of the story. These sorts of narrators find themselves so deeply immersed in the…
Read MoreThe Reflective Narrator
I’ve been thinking a bit about first-person narration lately, particularly the sort that uses what I’ll call a reflective narrator. In this type of first-person narration, the narrator speaks at a remove in time and space from the events being narrated. “This is not a happy story,” the narrator of Richard Ford’s “Great Falls,” tells…
Read MoreThe Precise Names of Things
Yesterday evening, Cathy and I drove down to the lake in Fryer Park, which is located off Orders Road about a mile from our home. It was a pleasant evening—humid, but overcast and with enough of a breeze to make things comfortable. We sat awhile on a bench overlooking the lake and then decided to…
Read MoreMercy on Father’s Day
I may have posted something like this before, but here on Father’s Day, I want to acknowledge the sons and fathers who find, or have found, the smallest moments of mercy and love in the midst of their difficult relationships. When I was a boy, I was my father’s helper. I helped him with…
Read MorePatience and Detours: Writing and Living in a Time of Pandemic
As we enter the heart of summer, I can tell that folks are coming down with quarantine fatigue. Patience is wearing thin, and people are antsy. Now isn’t the time to let down our guard. My wife Cathy, the Risk Management/Corporate Compliance Director at a small hospital shared a reminder yesterday on Facebook, encouraging people…
Read MoreWriting the Query Letter
In response to a recent post intended to encourage writers not to give up and to keep writing, someone asked me if I might offer some thoughts to those who have done exactly that and ended up with a book manuscript looking for a publisher. I imagine there are plenty of people who know much…
Read MoreOne Foot in Front of the Other: Keep Going
It’s a beautiful day here in central Ohio—sunny, temps in the mid-sixties, low humidity—a perfect day for a run. After years of running outside, I made the switch to a treadmill a few years ago. Then the pandemic hit and the gyms closed, and I was back on the streets. I’ve been running since the…
Read MoreResearch and Resurrection: Writing the Dead
The peonies are late this year. Here we are, Memorial Day weekend, and the buds have yet to open. When I was a boy, my mother made arrangements from peonies and irises in coffee cans anchored with gravel in their bottoms, and we drove from country cemetery to country cemetery, leaving those flowers on the…
Read MoreUsing a Sensory Detail to Invent a Narrative
It’s a summer Sunday here in central Ohio—temp in the low eighties, humid and mostly still, just the slightest stir of air from time to time. Such Sundays always remind me of similar days from my adolescence in tiny Sumner, Illinois—days when people could be lazy if they chose, days that could truly be days…
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