Tag Archive for ‘Real Life’
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Writer, Interrupted
Jill Smolowe hasn’t been writing much lately. She has a pretty good excuse: Lately I’ve been thinking about writing. And therein lies the problem. Thinking about writing is one thing; writing is another matter entirely. Though my professional writing life continues to produce a steady stream of words (and a steady paycheck), my personal writing life—the one that produces memoirs, essays and novels without guarantee of income or publication—has been largely in hibernation for three years now. I know that [...]
The Curse of Multitasking
Waiting to pick up my son after his play rehearsal, I sit in the car and grade student essays. I listen to podcasts as I drive over the George Washington Bridge to work. When the phone rings at home and it’s my sister, I get up from my desk to make beds, put in a load of laundry, start the dishwasher. I make sandwiches for school lunches while fixing dinner. I have come to realize that I rarely do one thing [...]
