Tag Archive for ‘writing a novel’
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 [...]
A New Twist to a Familiar Story
Karen Essex talks about how she reclaimed — and reframed — the vampire myth by exploring its female origins in her new novel, Dracula in Love: From the first time I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula in my teens, I just knew that Mina was not satisfied with her role as the quintessential Victorian virgin. Little did I dream that many years later, I would actually revise the story, retelling it from Mina’s perspective. Though Stoker’s Dracula was a brilliant creation [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Write Drunk, Edit Sober
In anticipation of the paperback release of my latest novel, Bird in Hand, my friend Gretchen Rubin invited me to answer some questions about happiness for her wonderful blog, The Happiness Project. One of her questions is, “Is there a happiness mantra or motto you’ve found very helpful?” I do have one — which I’ll write about for Gretchen (and link to here!) in a few days — but I love the answer to this question given by Larry Smith, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
