craft, technique

How some find narrative

November 29, 2009 | 8 Comments

If I care to look, WordPress reveals the Google searches people use to find this blog. Their phrases can be surprising or funny. Like: “does an essay have to be nonfiction.” Well, yes—whomever you are. By definition, in fact. Sometimes people’s searches suggest posts I wish I’d write—or accomplish myself in other writing: “taking creative nonfiction beyond the mundane.” I’ll drink to that. So would the editor who called a story of mine “plodding.” Ouch. (It’s easy to say no; …

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Prose: hot, fresh & handmade

November 18, 2009 | 10 Comments

The above is Gay Talese’s outline for his famous “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”—which Esquire named the best article it has ever published. I was struck by its childlike creativity when I saw it in the Summer 2009 issue of the Paris Review, and it and the journal’s interview with Talese are now on line. His working method is idiosyncratic: writing notes and detailed outlines on the thin cardboard that comes with new men’s shirts. He also supposedly peers at …

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John Irving on writing & America

November 9, 2009 | 4 Comments

Novelist John Irving holds forth on Big Think on an array of writing issues in short videos excerpted from a long interview. He discusses his working habits—eight to nine hours a day writing in longhand in lined notebooks, seven days a week—and the deep rifts in America that trouble him. He talks about using post-it notes, the long process of revision, achieving syntactical unity throughout a long work, and the glory of the long, lavishly detailed, plotted, visual nineteenth-century novels …

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Rhythm & flow in works of prose

October 6, 2009 | 3 Comments

Varying length, structure of sentences fosters voice & musicality. Clarity is a high virtue, but so is beauty; and increasingly I see that it is from varying length and sentence structure that writers achieve voice, rhythm, emphasis, and musicality. Variation works because we naturally vary our speaking rhythm when we’re emotionally connected to what we’re saying: “He fouled me! That jerk! Coach! You’re always telling us This is just a scrimmage—we’re still on the same team—don’t get carried away. Didn’t  you …

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The sentimentality tightrope

August 11, 2009 | 2 Comments

from Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg: “A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander. The fly on the table might be part of the whole description of a restaurant. It might be appropriate to tell precisely the sandwich that it just walked over, but there is a fine line between precision and self-indulgence. “Stay on the side of precision; know your …

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Discovery and structure

July 24, 2009 | 3 Comments

Whether they’re brooders or plungers, all writers suffer the same problem, how to discover and recognize their good stuff or even to find their true subjects. Writers lament how much material they must produce and then cut. Writing can seem so wasteful, and that’s painful: the useless work! Art seems to rely on having lots to select from, but getting bogged down in the swamp in the middle of the pathless forest can dishearten: Where is this thing going? For …

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Magical discovery, mundane craft

July 16, 2009 | 3 Comments

Don Murray, Dinty Moore & E.L. Doctorow on discovery in writing. Writers who admit to having more than a hunch as they launch a new essay, story, or book nevertheless are often paradoxical in their advice about initial composition: they may have a plan before writing, a sketchy outline and a destination—even the exact ending, word for word—but say their powerful material is discovered en route as they veer into the intuitive realm of the brain. Perhaps it is simply that, as …

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