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The Deep Eye: On the Embedded First Person
The first person is seductive. It feels, for many, like the most natural way to tell a story. We are all first person narrators of our own lives, after all, and surely it is the easiest thing in the...
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Metaphysical Description, Or How Many Potatoes Make How Much Vodka?
While it is hard enough to describe something effectively in fiction1—how a thing smells, moves, looks—sometimes it is useful to further describe how exactly a thing seems or appears to be, above and...
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Learning the Left Hand
I was suffering my own novel-panic when I read about John Stazinski’s in the Jan./Feb. issue of Poets & Writers—or, more accurately, I had been suffering the panic for years and was in the process...
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Fruits of the Same Tree: An Interview with Stephanie Powell Watts
Courtesy Doug Benedict Growing up in rural Missouri, near where Stephanie Powell Watts received her PhD at the University of Missouri-Columbia, my grandma used to throw out what we called “thought...
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[QUOTES & NOTES] Three Lazy Moves in Fiction
“Just concentrate on not making the lazy move.” - Morton Feldman, American Composer (1926-1987) The revisionist working style of fiction writers makes leisure quite seductive. If we don’t work our way...
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The Salvage Detective: Roberto Bolaño’s Guide to Saving the Novel In Your Drawer
So you’ve got a dreadful first novel stashed somewhere in the proverbial drawer. You can’t bear to foist it on one more friend, but you can’t bear to burn it, either, or delete that outdated .doc file,...
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[QUOTES & NOTES] Next Project Up: NaDoWriYoNoMo
“The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.” —British musician and artist Brian Eno Now that National Novel Writing Month is over you...
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The Strongly Felt Thing: An Interview with Dylan Nice
Dylan Nice / photo from the author A few months ago I ordered the second edition of Mary Miller’s Big World (Short Flight/Long Drive Books, 2009) and the publishers, Elizabeth Ellen and Aaron Burch,...
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Go On and Hate Me: The Remarkable Handling of Pity in Jean Rhys’ Voyage in...
My violent objection to the notion of “unlikeable characters” began in fall 1996, in a UC Santa Barbara literature seminar. I was 20 years old and on the edge of a near-suicidal breakdown, having...
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Your Gut is a Liar: An Interview with J. Robert Lennon
J. Robert Lennon / Photo Credit Lindsay France The feeling creeps up on you sometimes, maybe on an unwelcome birthday or when the radiator clinks on in the middle of a sleepless winter night: This is...
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The Unsaid Meaning of Writing: Don’t Write
On a recent trip out of New York, headed home to Seattle, where my wife and I share a house and also where much of my writing is done, I found myself on the jet-way leading from the terminal to the...
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Against Cleverness
I adore tongue-tied characters: the inarticulate ones who start sentences but can’t quite finish them; the ones who vomit up thoughts that seem to circumnavigate the globe before arriving at a point,...
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Keeping the Faith: An Interview with Amy Brill
Amy Brill has pulled off a magic trick—a highly literary novel that manages to enthrall even as it educates. In her debut The Movement of Stars (Riverhead), Brill’s protagonist Hannah is an amateur...
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That’s Funny
Three summers ago, I went straight from a ten-day teaching gig at Warren Wilson in North Carolina to Boston, where my father was dying. At least I thought he was dying. In the ten years of his long and...
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My Inner Erma: Embracing Humor Writing
My close friend Anthony once told me during an e-mail conversation that he considered me the modern-day equivalent of Erma Bombeck. I was offended. I think my actual reply was “WTF?” Anthony was...
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Gargoyles in the Classroom: Some Reflections on Popular Fiction in the...
Back in the 90’s, I was teaching a multi-genre creative writing class at Cape Fear Community College, a name I am not making up. There were almost thirty students, with a wide variety of backgrounds,...
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The Nature of Desire: What David Mamet and the Dalai Lama Can Teach Us About...
In the traditional Buddhist formulation, suffering flows from desire. The Four Noble Truths teach us as follows: suffering exists in the world; this suffering exists because we are attached to our...
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[QUOTES & NOTES] Next Project Up: NaDoWriYoNoMo
“The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.” —British musician and artist Brian Eno Now that National Novel Writing Month is over you...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Nature of Desire: What David Mamet and the Dalai Lama Can Teach Us About...
In the traditional Buddhist formulation, suffering flows from desire. The Four Noble Truths teach us as follows: suffering exists in the world; this suffering exists because we are attached to our...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Against Meaning: On Outpunting One’s Coverage and Achieving Greatness Anyway
On occasion we may feel moved to make some sort of point with our fiction (fratboys are pigs! being gay is fine!) and we’ll set off into our material armored with good intentions. If this intention...
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