Tag Archive for ‘fiction writing’
Nothing is Ever Lost
In which the writer Mark Trainer explains how old ideas can spring to life when you least expect it: One of my writing teachers way back when, George Garrett, used to say of being a writer, “Nothing is ever lost.” He meant it as comfort when every lit mag under the sun had rejected your story. Just because you can’t make use of it now doesn’t mean you won’t be able to years down the road. It’s true for the [...]
Beast of Burden
You may have noticed that I haven’t posted much lately. Keeping a blog is like having a pet — it requires constant maintenance. And when I wasn’t deep into writing my novel, I derived a lot of pleasure from it (and still do, in sporadic bursts). But working on a novel is like having a newborn baby. It keeps you up at night, it needs constant feeding, it’s unpredictable and exhausting. And like new parents who find that the frisky [...]
Great Writing
Justin Kramon didn’t think he was qualified to call himself a writer. And then he thought about his favorite books, and had a change of heart: For some reason, I used to have the perception that writers should be interesting, well-rounded, generally knowledgeable people. I got this idea before I’d met any writers, and certainly before I started trying to become one. In fact, my perception of writers was a big obstacle to writing, because – and I have to [...]
How Do You Become Someone Else?
The writer Elizabeth Strout, explaining what it’s like to write from the point of view of an irascible retired schoolteacher in her 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Olive Kitteridge: “I actually see myself in all my characters. In order to imagine what it feels like to be another person I have to use my own experiences and responses to the world. I have to play attention to what I have felt and observed, then push those responses to an extreme while [...]
What We Don’t Know We Know
The novelist Gayle Brandeis wrote about a traumatic and terrible event. And then it happened to her in real life. Several months ago, as I was proofreading my new novel, Delta Girls, a sentence I wrote last year kicked me in the gut: “My mother killed herself, you know.” It took me a moment to remember how to breathe again. I had not recalled writing that sentence, had not recalled that this was part of a character’s history, part of [...]
Inventing Characters from History
When novelist Laurie Albanese and art historian Laura Morowitz began collaborating on a novel about the 15th-century painter Fra Filippo Lippi, they discovered that their biggest challenge was to make the truth seem believable. Laurie Albanese explains: When my good friend Laura first handed me a book of Fra Filippo Lippi’s 15th-century paintings three years ago, she opened the door to a world as intriguing as it was unknown to me. The paintings and frescoes were vivid and arresting: A stunning [...]
Permission to Write
A small, bare room. An old lamp, an upholstered chair, a wooden desk by the window. Cows and trees beyond. No papers to grade, no phone calls to return. All the things that distract me, keep me from writing fiction — the to-do lists, children’s schedules, work-for-hire, committee meetings — are gone, gone, gone. Some people are here at the Virginia Center for the Arts for six or eight weeks. Me? Only one. And carving this week out of my [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Tap Dancing on the Beach
Hooray and congratulations! It’s pub day for Debra Galant, whose new novel, Cars from a Marriage, “delivers wit, charm and characters who feel like next-door neighbors,” according to Booklist. So why does Debra feel like she’s tap dancing on the beach? Politicians kiss babies. I take pictures of them chewing on postcards advertising my new novel, Cars from a Marriage. I know this is neither dignified nor author-like. Nor are a lot of things I’ve been doing in the six weeks [...]
