Blog
Five Ways We Keep Ourselves from Writing
The time in the semester has come when I’m overwhelmed with reading student work. That’s what I’ve been doing on this rainy day, and now I’m worn out, so I’m going to repost this section from my craft book, Telling Stories: I was thinking recently of all the ways that we sometimes keep ourselves from…
Read MoreLost Objects: A Writing Prompt
When I was in the fourth grade, my parents gave me a first baseman glove for my birthday. We lived in Oak Forest, Illinois, a southern suburb of Chicago. One of Chicagoland’s forest preserves, Yankee Woods, stretched out along the edge of the village, and that’s where my parents threw a party for me. My…
Read MoreSome Thoughts on Beginning a Story
Ernest Hemingway’s story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” opens like this: It was very late and everyone had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the daytime the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the…
Read MoreNo Explanations
At the end of Katherine Mansfield’s story, “The Garden Party,” a young girl, Laura, tries to explain to her brother, Laurie, what she’s just experienced. After an extravagant garden party at Laura’s home, her mother sends her down the hill with a basket of leftover food for the family of a young workingman who that…
Read MoreIt Could Have Been: The What-Ifs of Narrative
Cathy and I have been watching reruns of the old sitcom, My Three Sons, which first aired in 1960. At that time, I would have been around the same age as the youngest son, Chip, so watching the show has been a bit nostalgic for me. I remember the toys and board games I see…
Read MoreYard Sale: Let’s Start a Story
Cathy and I got some great bargains at Kroger today. Oak milk, two cartons for four dollars; quarts of vegan ice cream, buy one, get one free. Sometimes it takes so little to delight us. Thank goodness for the upright freezer in our basement. So that’s it. That’s the end of the story. It isn’t…
Read MoreAt the Start of a New School Year
Here we are again at the start of a new school year. Autumn, customarily notable for its decay—leaves falling and winter coming—has always signaled the start for me. I’ve spent forty-two years of my life teaching people how to be better writers, so fall has always meant renewal. It’s always been the chance to start…
Read MoreCharacters on Road Trips
At 12:30 a.m. the night before Cathy and I were to board a plane to Kennedy airport and then on to Burlington, Vermont, I happened to check my phone where I learned the flight from Kennedy to Burlington had been cancelled, and, when Cathy called Delta, she learned that there were no other flights the…
Read MoreKeep Working
Here we are at the end of July, the time when we begin to make the turn to the start of a new school year. For me, it’s a few weeks off, but those weeks will go fast, and before I know it, the endless days of summer will come to an end. It’s a…
Read MoreThe Importance of Silence in Narratives
My wife Cathy is in Chicago this week, visiting her sister, so, the house, without her to talk to, is filled with much more silence than usual. This has me thinking about how fiction writers sometimes rush to get the plot onto the page, neglecting the benefits of putting space around significant events through the…
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