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…
Read MoreA 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,…
Read MoreTwo 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…
Read MoreWhat 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…
Read MoreWhat 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…
Read MoreFollowing the Trouble to Its End
When I run on a treadmill at the Y on the weekends, the television in front of me is often showing a program, which I believe may be called Dr. Chris Pet Vet. It’s a show about pets in need of care for one reason or the other. The owners bring their pets to Dr.…
Read MoreA Teacher Who Took the Time
This week I re-watched the Bill Murray movie, Groundhog Day, because I wanted to see my former teacher, Lucy Gabbard, the woman who had such an effect on me when I was first an undergraduate and then a graduate student at Eastern Illinois University. She’s billed as “Flat Tire Lady” in this film because she’s…
Read MoreCourage, Confidence, Curiosity: Writing the First Draft
My neighbor, Uwe, likes to walk. I mean, really walk. Five, seven, ten miles—it’s nothing for him, and he’s a little shy of 75 years old. Sometimes he’s on the treadmill next to mine at the local YMCA where I run five miles every other day, but I know he likes to get out on…
Read MoreBeing Good Stewards of Our Gifts: Advice for Writers and the Writing We Do
I just got back from Vermont yesterday, which explains the lateness of this weekly post. I was teaching at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference along with many of my favorite colleagues. (By the way, this conference, at least to my way of thinking, is one of the very best.) This morning,…
Read MoreTaming the Shaggy Beast: Letting Your Novel Write Itself
The laconic comedian, Stephen Wright, once said, “I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.” Now there’s a man determined to tame the shaggy beast, as Henry James called the novel form. I don’t know about you, but I think I’d prefer a few more practical strategies for getting the job done than…
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