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Past, Present, Future: Layering in Narrative
I recently watched the Robert Zemeckis film Here. The film’s nonlinear structure tells the story of a single plot of land and the people who lived on it over a wide span of years. From time to time, the screen subdivides into multiple panes, so we see events from different time periods seeming to occur…
Read MorePeople Come and People Go: Narratives of Arrivals and Departures
Cathy and I were having breakfast this morning at one of our favorite local restaurants when a little boy’s head popped up above the partition separating our table from a booth on the other side. He was, as we would soon learn, “not three,” which we understood to mean he was two. He and Cathy…
Read MoreStrategies for Finding Empathy for Our Characters
Last week, I posted about the importance of having empathy for our characters even those who are less that admirable. This week, I want to continue thinking about exactly how we can find that empathy. Here are a few strategies: Be a matchmaker. When I was just beginning to work on my novel, River of…
Read MoreEmpathy
I grew up in a rural part of southeastern Illinois. My father was a farmer. My mother was a teacher. My childhood was racially monochromatic. I, and everyone around me, was as white as white could be. My first memory of interaction with a Black person came when I was four years old. My aunt…
Read MoreUsing Photographs in Memoir: An Illustration
In the photograph, my mother isn’t looking at the camera. Instead, she’s looking down on her nephew, who must be about two at the time. He holds onto her hand. He’s dapper in his playsuit, his chubby legs bare from knees to ankles where his short white socks and his baby shoes anchor him. Still,…
Read MoreUsing the Figurative to Deepen the Prose
I love Jill Christman’s essay, “The Sloth,” so much, I’m going to quote it here, as published in Brevity, in its entirety: There is a nothingness of temperature, a point on the body’s mercury where our blood feels neither hot nor cold. I remember a morning swim on the black sand eastern coast of…
Read MoreBelieve
Last night, Cathy and I braved the cold and snow and ice to hear the music of Phil Dirt and the Dozers, a band who plays, as one member says, “songs from the nineteen-hundreds.” In other words, an oldies band that first formed in 1981and has kept going ever since. One member is approaching eighty;…
Read MoreSmall Moments of Joy
Here in central Ohio, we’re in the heart of winter. Snow on the ground. Cold temperatures. Fierce winds. Dark longer in the mornings. Gray days. Early nightfalls. It’s enough, at least for me, to invite despair. Especially at night, just before I close my eyes for sleep, I’m prone to wander into what I call…
Read MoreIn Memoriam
When I met Carter Taylor Seaton, we were in her hometown of Huntington, West Virginia. I’d driven down from Ohio with my wife Cathy because Eliot Parker had invited me to do a reading and an interview with a show on local cable television. He introduced me to Carter, a wiry, white-haired woman who reminded…
Read MoreUsing Liminal Spaces to Create Narratives
Here we are at the end of another year, and soon we’ll be beginning a new one. These liminal spaces, where we stand at a threshold, one foot in the present and one in the future, can be fruitful for character exploration in our writing. Consider a character who buys something new. Maybe it’s a…
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