Lee Martin

I’m about to start revising a manuscript for a novel that I finished long ago enough that I can’t remember exactly when I did finish it. When I started the draft, as usual, I didn’t have much of an idea where I was going, but more important than that, I didn’t know what the story…

Last week, I wrote about using sensory details to take us to material from our lives that might merit examination in a piece of memoir. This morning, I woke up thinking about sounds from my childhood. It seems to me that we all have a few sounds that take us back into the past—sounds that…

I was coming out of a Target store yesterday, when the scent of discount store popcorn immediately took me back to my childhood in Oak Forest, IL. Saturdays, I’d go with my parents to Markham to shop. We’d get groceries at Jewel Foods and sundry items at Zayre’s. I remember the smell of the popcorn…

A friend of mine, an excellent poet, was talking to me recently about plot. He didn’t understand, he told me, how we fiction writers did it. It was beyond him how we string a series of events together into a story. So here are ten tips for constructing a plot. 1. Plot always begins with…

In the aftermath of the recent presidential election, much blame has been put on the voters from the rural Midwest, my native land. I’ll admit this is a complicated time for me. Like many of you, I’m angry about a Trump presidency and fearful for what lies ahead. The election has made it clear how…

Let’s say you’re at a public event and you run into a couple, who also happen to be your dear friends, and let’s say you look at the man and then say with great solemnity, “You have my condolences,” and the woman says as a joke, “Why? Because he’s with me?” And let’s say the…

Over twenty-five years ago, I was working on a story that ended up being called “The Least You Need to Know.” I’d reached a point in the composition of the story where I didn’t know what would come next. This happened to me often in those days and still does to a certain extent. I’ve…

When I was in the third grade, I went trick or treating in a Bullwinkle J. Moose costume. You know the kind. It came in a box, and my mother probably bought it at a Zayre department store. It was a thin, rayon suit with a plastic mask, the kind with the elastic band that…

Our lives are made up of many strands—some of experience, some of memory, some of meditation and reflection, some of ongoing action. Those who write memoir must find the appropriate forms for ensuring that the textures of life will have their full expression. What we know about the braided essay offers us a plan for…

Flannery O’Connor famously said, “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” Granted, there’s probably more than a nugget of truth in what O’Connor said, but this quote has…