Blog
The Variation in the Habitual: Creating Scenes
We’ve hit a stretch of hot, dry days here in central Ohio, each day like the one before it. The grass is brown, the trees are dropping their leaves, the sun blazes. I long for a variation in the pattern, something out of the ordinary, something to make me say, “Ah, here’s something different.” Such…
Read MoreComing Clean: Characters and Their Confessions
Cathy and I went to The Ohio Theatre last night to watch The Music Man, part of the summer film series. The movie is set in 1912 in River City, Iowa, where a con man, Professor Harold Hill, convinces the townsfolk that the appearance of a pool table in the billiard hall is a grave…
Read MoreFirst Drafts: The Delight of the Surprise
This afternoon, Cathy and I made our first pilgrimage of the growing season to Bambi’s Produce Market a few miles out in the country from where we live. Sunday afternoons, so it seems, are perfect for such trips, partly because we have the time and partly because such drives remind me of similar ones I…
Read MorePressure Points in Narratives
I’ve told this story before, so please excuse me for telling it again. It has so much to do with everything I want to say about pressure points in narrative. On the last night that my mother lived independently, a package addressed to her neighbor was accidentally delivered to her. My mother was a kind…
Read MoreWe Were Here: Subversive Precision
I was eighteen in 1974 when I picked up my now-wife, Cathy, for our first date. It was the era of 8-track tape players in cars, and I had a Craig in my Plymouth Duster. The tape I played that night, as I drove to the Avalon Theater, was Elton John’s Don’t Shoot Me I’m…
Read MoreDecorating a Scene: Description in Narrative
Here we are on Memorial Day, and our peonies are in bloom. These showy, fragrant flowers were in every bouquet that my mother always made to set upon our family’s graves on what we then called Decoration Day. I look forward to their buds opening this time of year, not only because I enjoy their…
Read MoreTime and Narrative in Memoir
When it comes to writing memoir, we can never give full expression to an entire life. We have too much from which to choose—too much time, too many moments, too many characters, too many questions. We can, though, find a narrative arc that, if handled skillfully, will contain more of the past, the present, and…
Read MoreWriting into the Mysterious and the Unresolved
On this Easter Sunday, I’m thinking of the small country church I attended when I was a small boy. The Berryville Church of Christ sat on a gravel road just south of the crossroads where my grandmother lived cattycorner from the general store. There wasn’t much to Berryville: that store, two churches, a defunct school,…
Read MoreThe Best Days: Deepening Stories with the Ordinary
Yesterday, a Saturday, I worked out while Cathy slept in, and later we went out for breakfast. It was a beautiful October day here in the Midwest—sunny and warm—and we’d talked about going down to Circleville for the Pumpkin Show, but Cathy had gotten home late the night before after a week in Illinois for…
Read MoreMaking Stories Matter in Creative Nonfiction
I could tell you a story, as I do in my essay, “Bastards,” about the night a young man opened the back door to our house and stepped inside while my mother was washing dishes. I could recall, fact by fact, what happened next. The relevant question for those of us who write creative nonfiction…
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