Last week, I posted ten random thoughts about writing a novel. To give equal time to my other genre, I offer these ten random thoughts about writing a memoir. 1.         If you want revenge, don’t write a memoir. Start nasty rumors instead. When we write about people, we want to be fair to them even…

1.         Writing a draft of a novel for me is often a process of discovering what it is that I want to hold back until the end. That something may be a plot turn, or it may be something that the main character doesn’t know about him or herself, or best of all, it may…

The miserable winter weather we’re having here in Ohio has reminded me of the snowy night in 1965, when my parents and I had to make the five-hour drive from our suburban Chicago home to the downstate hospital where my grandmother was dying. We’d left our farm and our extended family behind in order for…

So a time comes, eventually, when the writing isn’t going well. It happens to all of us. We stare at the computer screen, or the page, and we don’t have a clue. It’s like words have become bricks we try to lift with our tongues, or maybe language, tired of our ineptitude, has packed up…

I had the good fortune last week of winning a literary prize for a short story that came from a friend’s Facebook status (thanks A.D!), which goes to show you that you never know where you might find your material. After all, writers are lurkers, right? We have our ears and eyes open. We encounter…

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…