Craft as conduit to art & Brenda Miller’s seminal essay on form. If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.—Bret Lott, “Against Technique” I read many student personal essays, memoirs, and literary analyses. I’m not one who bashes student writing, says kids today can’t write—the …
A deeply processed tribute to Nora Ephron. I admire it.
Distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything. —Jonah Lehrer* After my next post, on Dinty W. Moore’s new book The Mindful Writer, this blog is apt to fall totally silent for a few weeks. On Tuesday I’m flying with my wife and daughter to London, where we’ll meet up with our son who has been living in …
Elizabeth Browne has wrung out the gems in the fascinating NYT story about Robert Caro and his working process.
Aaron Gilbreath’s post explicates the practice of a legendary New Yorker journalist whose exhaustive immersions allowed him to write with great freedom in reconstructing his subjects’ realities. My own views of Mitchell’s practice were influenced, like Aaron’s, by William Zinsser’s endorsement in On Writing Well, considered the gold standard for mainstream magazine journalism.
My standards are so low. I don’t feel like I am . . . protecting writing from amateurs or dabblers or those who are simply no good. My students have expressed a profound interest in writing. I let them write what they want to write.—Michael Martone, linked below Marissa, who blogs at Paucis Verbis, has named Narrative [this blog’s first name] one of her top five favorite blogs of 2012 (already!). I am pleased and grateful to her for this notice …