Tag Archive for ‘Real Life’
Writing Past the Blind Spot
Last week Bonnie Friedman found out something big … As soon as I finished writing my guest post for this blog last week about how “people don’t do such things,” I put the computer in “sleep” mode, stood up, and the answer to the question I was secretly asking washed through me. Why couldn’t I really believe that people in the world do mean and otherwise outrageous things (things that, if I could believe in them, I could let my characters [...]
How Much of the Book is True?
Sheila Kohler, author of the new novel Becoming Jane Eyre, offers a nuanced answer to this perennial question: Shortly after the publication of my first novel, The Perfect Place, my husband and I were invited to dinner by friends. I can still see us sitting somewhat awkwardly side by side while our hostess, a book critic, quizzed us about the new book. The book, you need to know, is narrated by a cold, detached woman who moves through her isolated [...]
Words to Remember Amid the Madding Crowd
Two quotes from Robert Frost that seem particularly apt this time of year: “There’s absolutely no reason for being rushed along with the rush. Everybody should be free to go very slow…. What you want, what you’re hanging around in the world waiting for, is for something to occur to you.” (March 21, 1954) “But yield who will to their separation, My object in living is to unite My avocation and my vocation As my two eyes make one in [...]
Guest Blog: Lisa Romeo Adds Her Two Cents to the Writer-as-Parent Manifesto
[Editor's note: Yesterday, on her terrific blog about writing, writer/editor Lisa Romeo talked about Louise DeSalvo's piece in this space and added some tips of her own. Thanks, Lisa, for giving me permission to post them here as well.] Just the other day I was passing along tips to some writing class students who have school-age children and were explaining (that is, complaining) how little time this leaves them to write. Then today I came across this tough-love post by [...]
Guest Blog: Louise DeSalvo on Why Having Kids is No Excuse
A celebrated memoirist calls the bluff of a parent who laments that he doesn’t have time to write: He was across the street raking leaves, and I went over to say hello one a cool autumn day, to take a break from my work, writing about my father’s life during World War II. “How did you write when you had kids?” he asked me. “I have this book I want to write, and I can’t get anywhere. All the housework [...]
Everything is Material
When I’m working on a novel, everything is material … It’s Back-to-School night, an annual ritual I must repeat three times this year in three different schools. (Bad planning, those birth dates.) High school, middle school, elementary, it’s all the same: green-tinted fluorescents buzzing faintly overhead, the slight whiff of disinfectant, at least one nervous teacher with a fistful of bullet points, several dozing parents. Yet despite the surface sameness, each endless evening is endless in its own way. So [...]
Five Life Lessons I Learned Writing my New Novel
1. I am not a supermodel. Or a professional soccer player. At times, over the eight long years it took to finish Bird in Hand, I was seized with panic. Look at all those fresh-faced young writers madly producing books, while I grow wrinkled and gray! But then I realized: it doesn’t matter how damn old I am. Unlike some professions, writing does not require that you have dewy skin or the speed of an antelope. All that matters are [...]
Guest Blog: Alexandra Enders on Claiming Authority as a Writer
What do you say when someone asks, “And what do you do?” When someone asks what I do, I say I’m a writer, or sometimes a novelist, but I never say I’m an author. Most writers I know are the same way. It sounds humbler, I suppose, more like what we do instead of what we are. And yet perhaps there’s more to it. To be an author, after all, means to have authority. Doesn’t it? Years ago, I sat [...]
Real Life Sucks
Back from Europe. Kids milling around the house until September 9th, when school finally starts. Basement fridge a horror. Weeds all over the yard. Mounds of laundry; an endless cycle of food shopping, preparing, clean-up. Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton: I’m thinking of you.
Quick Link: The Name So Nice I Used it Twice
You’d think that someone who spends her days creating and naming characters might have gotten the hang of it by the time she had to name some actual humans. That’s what I thought, at least. In fact, I was rather smug about it … So begins my guest post on Nameberry, a very cool baby name site that’s the brainchild (so to speak — yes, I did) of bestselling writers Pamela Redmond Satran and Linda Rosenkrantz. Even someone who names [...]
