Tag Archive for ‘creative process’
Lost in Translation
The Portuguese writer Clara Paulino thought she’d never find another language that could express the depth and nuance of her experience. And then she did: A few months ago I made the momentous discovery that I can write in English. Strange discovery, one might say, given that I have lived “in English” for the past seven years and teach Art History to American students. Yet it was the sound of Portuguese that welcomed me into this world, and English is [...]
Can We Write About Our Kids? Further Reflections
The writer Lisa Gornick revisits this vexing question – and digs a little deeper: A few weeks ago I posted on this site an account of writing — and ultimately deciding not to publish — an essay about my teenaged son. Most of the responses were questions about whether the caution I took with my son should extend to other categories: siblings, spouses, parents, nieces, nephews. These questions pushed me to reflect more deeply on various threads of my decision. The [...]
Get Inspired!
Recently I shared some exercises I use with my students at Fordham for revising fiction and narrative nonfiction. But a lot of us need inspiration at the other end of the process, too — right at the beginning. So below are some of the best writing prompts I’ve used over the years. Some I made up, some I gathered from other writers, and some I found in books. You can approach these any way you wish: write about yourself, another [...]
How to Guest Blog (Is This Postmodern, or What?)
In which the intrepid C. M. Mayo (whose recent novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, is not-so-coincidentally out in paperback) explains why guest blogging is a flourishing new literary genre and a powerful tool for promotion, and provides 10 hot tips for coming up with your own guest blog posts. And does it, of course, in a guest blog. Derrida would have a field day. I felt very avant garde back in 2006, when I wrote my first [...]
Revising Nonfiction
Sometimes when you’re revising it helps to have a specific assignment. Last week in this space I listed some exercises that my fiction-writing students find useful. Here are some revision ideas that my memoir and journalism students particularly like: 1) Write down three adjectives (beautiful, aggressive, haughty) that describe a character in your narrative/memoir. (Be sure the adjectives describe different qualities, not the same ones. For instance, handsome, well-groomed, muscular are too similar, as opposed to handsome, talkative, and mechanically [...]
Can We Write about Our Kids?
Novelist and clinical psychologist Lisa Gornick explores this question — and finds an answer she can live with: Last year, I wrote an essay about a dark patch in the otherwise largely luminous life of my sixteen-year-old son. When the essay was finished, I showed it to him. It was Sunday morning. My son put down the newspaper to read the pages I handed him, and I left him alone in the kitchen, busying myself with chores. I was prepared [...]
Five Ways to Jumpstart a Revision
This week I’m working on revising fiction with my undergraduate and grad students at Fordham. Below are some of the tips and ideas I’ve collected over the years that my students find most useful. (Next week I’ll talk in this space about the best exercises I’ve found for revising nonfiction.) 1) First, answer these questions: What is my story about? Another way of saying this is: What is the pattern of change? Once this pattern is clear, you can check [...]
Inside the Skin
“The older we get, the more … you realize there’s a whole range of things you will never do, of things and people you will never be. As life becomes more and more limiting, there is something wonderful about being able to get inside the skin of people unlike yourself.” — Lee Smith Lee Smith is the author, most recently, of Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger
Bi-Curious about Writing Fiction
This was never the way she planned — not her intention. But journalist Cindy Schweich Handler wrote some fiction. And she liked it. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a writer. And since I was an avid reader of fiction as a kid, that meant being a novelist. I was in fourth grade when I wrote the vaguely titled “Castle of Things,” a blatant rip-off of “Alice in Wonderland.” A year later, I followed this [...]
Reinventing the Novel
My friend Pamela Redmond Satran is a novelist, New York Times bestselling author, ninja web developer, and one-time magazine editor. Now she’s embarking on something entirely new: Two things inspired me to write my new novel, Ho Springs, online, day by day, instead of writing it for a conventional publisher the way I did my first five novels. Well, two things that are easy to explain. The first was my husband, after watching the DVD of American Gangster, telling me he found [...]
