Tag Archive for ‘The Creative Process’
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 Makes a Book Great? A Voracious Reader Shares Her Insights
From October 2008 to October 2009, Nina Sankovitch read one book a day and wrote about it on her blog, Read All Day. After learning about this project in a New York Times article, I went to Nina’s site and found some terrific insights into what makes a book great – so I asked Nina if I could adapt them here: The traits of great writing are: genuineness, truth, fearlessness. Say it out loud: no fear. Let your words flap [...]
Guest Blog: Essayist Maureen Stanton on Why Insight is the Last Thing to Come
For this writer, the creative process happens in stages – and the final one makes all the difference: The first is the molecular stage, that early collection of bits of information, what I find fascinating, unusual, funny or poignant at the time it occurs, whether I retain it in memory or in a physical form on pieces of paper. The critical mass stage is next. The particles are vibrating on their own in proximity to one another until they reach [...]
Quick Link: On Auto Wrecks and Adultery
When I lived in London last summer I was lucky enough to get to know the novelist Karen Essex. (Her recent, internationally bestselling books are Leonardo’s Swans and Stealing Athena.) Recently she moderated a conversation between Penny Vincenzi, the #1 bestselling British novelist, and me because our new novels — The Best of Times and Bird in Hand — both begin with car accidents that change the lives of the central characters. Karen was interested in two things in particular: [...]
I See Imaginary People
Talking with WNYC newscaster and ‘All Things Considered’ host Amy Eddings recently, I learned that before she became a journalist she used to write fiction. “But my novelist friends talked about hearing the voices of their characters in their heads as they wrote. I never heard those voices,” she said. “That was when I realized I was better suited to nonfiction.” I’ve never thought of the difference between fiction and non-fiction writing quite like this, but she’s right, I think. [...]
