Decorating a Scene: Description in Narrative
Here we are on Memorial Day, and our peonies are in bloom. These showy, fragrant flowers were in every bouquet that my mother always made to set upon our family’s graves on what we then called Decoration Day. I look forward to their buds opening this time of year, not only because I enjoy their…
Read MoreLives of Splendor: Characters and Free Will
This morning at breakfast, a large group—too large to sit at a single table—came into the restaurant. Half of them sat at one table, and the other half took an adjacent table, which was behind where Cathy and I were sitting. I really didn’t take much notice of them until I heard a man’s voice…
Read MoreTen Precepts for the Writing Life
Here on Mother’s Day, I offer these ten precepts for mothering the craft: 1. Accept the fact that the majority of people have no idea how a writer works and has no appreciation of what a writer does. That guy at the gym who squints at your Iron Horse Literary Review tee-shirt with a…
Read MoreTime and Narrative in Memoir
When it comes to writing memoir, we can never give full expression to an entire life. We have too much from which to choose—too much time, too many moments, too many characters, too many questions. We can, though, find a narrative arc that, if handled skillfully, will contain more of the past, the present, and…
Read MoreThe Last Time: Using the Past to See the Present and the Future
Last night, at The Ohio State University, we commemorated the conferring of MFAs on this year’s class with a gala reading from their work. We call this event Epilog. I’ve always wondered why whoever named the event didn’t go with the preferred spelling, Epilogue, but, no matter, the meaning is the same: an addition that…
Read MoreWriting into the Mysterious and the Unresolved
On this Easter Sunday, I’m thinking of the small country church I attended when I was a small boy. The Berryville Church of Christ sat on a gravel road just south of the crossroads where my grandmother lived cattycorner from the general store. There wasn’t much to Berryville: that store, two churches, a defunct school,…
Read MoreFollowing Your Characters: A Cure for Hesitant Starts
Cathy and I wanted to go out to dinner last night. Surely we aren’t the only couple whose conversation about where to dine goes like this: Me: Where do you want to go? Her: I don’t care. Me: I don’t care either. You pick. Her: It doesn’t matter to me. Me: One of us…
Read More“’Oh, Glory’: Persistence and Courage in the Writing Game
The 145th running of the Kentucky Derby is a month away, and partly for that reason, I’m thinking this morning of Secretariat, the 1973 Triple Crown winner and one of the greatest thoroughbred racehorses to ever run. I’m thinking about him while I’m running on the treadmill, recalling the scene from Secretariat, the 2010 movie…
Read MoreWriting the Second Draft
Cathy and I spent the afternoon clearing out our landscaping, which mostly involved cutting away old growth to make way for new growth this spring. It strikes me that moving from a first draft to a second one involves a similar process. After we know exactly what our piece is exploring, we have to cut…
Read MoreTen Quotes to Sustain Us
I don’t know about you, but from where I sit in the Midwest, this has been a long, hard winter. Spring keeps delaying its arrival. The writing life can be like that. It can give us gray days, isolation, disappointment, and downright gloom. We all know a life spent writing is full of peaks and…
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