Lee Martin

Dusk comes early this time of year out in the country. Across the barren fields, pole lights come on in farm yards. Down a stretch of gravel road, headlights crest a hill and sweep across the horizon. Down lanes, lights fill the windows at houses, and sometimes I’m tempted to drive toward them, to knock…

We’re at the end of another semester here at Ohio State University. I’ve gathered revisions from the students in my fiction workshops, and I’m starting to read through them. I’m celebrating the victories and pointing out the battles yet to be won. One student writes to say she’s getting comfortable with the messiness of the…

I’ve had a request to say some more about the process by which writers begin to internalize the artistic choices other writers make. For me, this process begins with the way in which I read other writers’ work. When I read, I’m constantly thinking about how a writer does what he or she does on…

(In honor of Thanksgiving week, I’ve decided to rerun this section from my book, Telling Stories: The Craft of Narrative and the Writing Life, and with it to issue an invitation for you to let me know if there’s something particular you’d like me to talk about—some issue of craft, or some thoughts on how…

The change to Daylight Saving Time has me in a pensive mood this Sunday. Last night, at a book club who’d read my novel, Late One Night, we talked about why people just can’t seem to get the fact that no matter how different we are, we’re all connected. We all share in the responsibility…

Here’s the truth. Sometimes at the end of a story, either fiction or memoir, we lie. Without meaning to, we withhold the truth by turning away from the particulars of the worlds and the people we’ve put on the page. Which is to say we lie by being lazy; we lie by being abstract. We…