I ponder the writer’s never-ending education. This is part one of a three-part series on the major lessons I learned while writing Shepherd: A Memoir, which is scheduled to be published in Spring 2014. “I don’t think writers go to college,” my father informed me as I prepared to leave home for college. His unsparing honesty was one of the reasons I hadn’t revealed my ambitions, of course, but my dreams were obvious. And while Dad was trying to be helpful, …
McPhee explains loving revision, I rename this blog Draft No. 4. If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer. —John McPhee Thursday night, I told my wife about my notion …
No one expects the days to be gods—Ralph Waldo Emerson The Days are Gods by Liz Stephens. Nebraska, 203 pp. Last week I got four memoirs in the mail and picked up the most celebrated. Bounced right off it. Next, I tried The Days are Gods by Liz Stephens and got hooked. That happened despite what seemed thin material: L.A.-Hollywood gal with roots in middle America sees middle age approaching, moves with her mate, an ex-actor-turned-welder, to rural Utah for …
Lee Child: Write What You Feel. Having just featured Lee Child on using questions to propel narrative, I was intrigued with this explication of more of Child’s advice by blogger Wilson K.
William Zinsser affirms a truth: intention trumps craft. A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other. —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet In this blog largely about craft, sometimes I must remind myself that intention is more important than craft. That is, the spirit behind the work is at least as important as that which makes it visible. I saw this …
Jill Talbot’s braided essay & Lee Child on creating suspense. It’s difficult for most people to verbalize the ways in which they disappoint themselves and others. The personal essay and the memoir demand that it be written down, perhaps even read aloud to others. The genre, I tell my students, is not for everyone. If you’re not comfortable with looking closely at where you have gone wrong or at least trying to find out why, you’re not going to be …
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 …