Lee Martin

I didn’t start out as a prose writer. I started out writing angst-filled poems when I was a teenager. Then in college I took a modern drama class, and the next thing I knew I was writing plays. I did all that before I decided I was a storyteller and that fiction was my genre.…

As we enter the last few days of 2013, perhaps it’s a good time to offer some thoughts about ending a piece of fiction or nonfiction with resonance. Before I do, though, please let me thank all of you who have read my blog this year, have taken time to leave comments, and offered me…

Running through the neighborhood this morning, I came upon a young mother playing roller hockey with her two sons at the end of their court. She wasn’t just going through the motions. She was committed, in all the way, and her kids were loving it. My own mother was never a young mother. She was…

I’m reading Russell Banks’s new story collection, A Permanent Member of the Family, and a few of the stories have reminded me of a good lesson for the writer of short fiction. One of our challenges is to make our stories fresh. To do that, we need to consider how we handle our material. How…

I wasn’t sure I’d be able to run this morning. A light snow was falling, and the streets already had patches of ice on them from yesterday’s storm. I walked a ways and had just about decided to play it safe. Then I saw a stretch of pavement with no ice on it, and I…

Last week in my undergraduate fiction workshop, I found myself talking about the value of mystery in the opening of a short story. Of course, there are a number of ways to open a story, but let’s say you’re desperate for one. Let’s say you’re in the pre-writing stage of a new story, and not…

A few days ago, I made the following post on Facebook: One of my boyhood friends died yesterday (here we are in the middle row of this photo: I, on the far left with my arm over my eyes, and he, on the far right wearing a white T-shirt).  Although I hadn’t seen him or…

My MFA in Creative Nonfiction workshop at Ohio State went through some activities last week to help them with revising their essays. Two of the people in the workshop, Cait Weiss and Jody Gerbig Todd, have been kind enough to allow me to share the activities that they devised. I hope you’ll find them as…

Often the thing we’ve come to say in an essay hovers just at the periphery of our first drafts and in us as well. There are places in those drafts where we can almost bring our most important thoughts to full articulation via reflection, narration, or the artful arrangement of images. Subsequent drafts are usually…

Sitting peacefully, doing nothing spring comes and the grass grows all by itself.  —Lao Tzu I’m nearing the end of the first draft of a new novel. Maybe a scene or two more, and I’ll have it. Already, I know what my first revision strategy will be. Put that sucker away. Put it out of…