Here we are at the halfway point of our ten-week workshop. I hope things are going well and that the posts are giving you some important things to consider as you develop your craft. I know it’s been a good thing for me to think more deeply about the techniques, strategies, and issues that have…

We took a dip into Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners yesterday, reading the section called “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” She spends some time reminding us that fiction is concrete:  “The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and…

We’ve been talking quite a bit in the fiction workshop about the necessity of a story arriving at a surprising and yet inevitable end. We’ve talked about how to build multidimensional characters by paying attention to their contradictory impulses, and how to defamiliarize a character or a situation by allowing a misfit detail to arise.…

Our conversation in the fiction workshop began yesterday with a consideration of a chapter from Charles Baxter’s excellent book, Burning Down the House. The chapter, “On Defamiliarization,” deals with how writers can sometimes know their stories too early in the writing process. A writer might, for example, decide early on that his or her story…

There’s a moment in Tobias Wolff’s story, “An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke,” where Brooke’s colleague, Riley, asks him to tell him the worst things he’s ever done. As I was walking upstairs to meet my MFA fiction workshop for the first time this quarter, I was thinking about how in all good…

On January 3 (we start our Winter Quarter quickly here at Ohio State), I’ll meet my MFA fiction workshop for the first time. I’ve been preparing my syllabus. In addition to the discussion of original fiction from the twelve MFA students in the room, we’ll take a look at stories by Tobias Wolff (“An Episode…

I’ve been teaching a fiction workshop this quarter designed especially for poets and nonfiction writers in our MFA program at Ohio State. In addition to its official course number, English 765B, I like to attach a subtitle: “Meet Your Best Friend, Mr. Right Margin.” That’s directed mainly toward the poets, of course, who sometimes have…

Not long ago in my creative nonfiction workshop, I found myself talking about the necessity of the generosity of the writer. I find this true, of course, no matter the genre, but I find it particularly true when we’re talking about memoir. We need to be generous enough to make room for the characters in…

It’s been an autumn of travel for me, having done readings in Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Ohio , and Tennessee, and it’s been so good to renew friendships and to start new ones. Here’s a compilation of where I’ve been and what’s happened on the road, just a glimpse of what it’s like to be on…

I’m reading Jean Thompson’s novel, The Year We Left Home, and today I came upon this passage: “But back home, I can look up and down just about any street and there’s people I’m either related to or I’ve known them all my life and my parents have known them and my grandparents knew their…