Don’t submit your beloved manuscript too early. This is part three 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. There’s such a high in completing a book’s first draft. A whole manuscript. In You’ve Got a Book in You: A Stress-Free Guide to Writing the Book of Your Dreams, Elizabeth Sims nails it: To write a book is to open and give yourself to a world thirsty …
In writing, I learn, it’s wise to emphasize love over discipline. This is part two 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. There’s a common notion that self-discipline is a freakish peculiarity of writers—that writers differ from other people by possessing enormous and equal portions of talent and willpower. They grit their powerful teeth and go into their little rooms. I think that’s a bad …
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, …
Shepherd: A Memoir to be published in Spring 2014. I was fifty and the marketing manager of a university press when one day I decided I would write a book. My own book. The story I needed to tell. There I was, bent over a drawer in the press’s endless row of gray-green filing cabinets, and from the radio perched somewhere overhead I heard a writer, a man my age, talking about his latest book. What am I waiting for? …
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 …
To the memory of Freckles, sheep super mother, and my teacher. In my decade as a grass farmer, as a shepherd, my lambs came in the middle of April. They dropped heavy and wet and wriggling onto the pasture. The spring grass was shiny and emerald green, as billowy as a blanket across the ground, and for a time made southern Ohio look like Ireland. Every morning, such sweet newborn lambs they were, coming into my arms dazed and ethereal. …
Spiritual Affinities. I’m pleased to have a guest post today at Daisy Hickman’s Sunny Room Studio on the spiritual insights and strength I’ve drawn from a number of thinkers, especially Eckhart Tolle, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Virginia Woolf. They’ve given me “fragments to shore against my ruins,” as T.S. Eliot put it in his poem “The Waste Land.”