revision

Q&A: Dinty W. Moore on Buddhism, creativity, kindness & taming the ego

May 20, 2012 | 9 Comments

Listen to where the writing wants to take you. Understand that the writing itself will often provide far richer material than your logical, predictable mind. Even more “intellect-driven” writing—for instance, a dissertation—can benefit from the cognitive leaps that occur when you stand back from the manuscript a moment and listen to your intuition.—Dinty W. Moore  The Mindful Writer by Dinty W. Moore. Wisdom Publications, 152 pp.  A popular image of the writer is of someone with heavy baggage and a …

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There’s something about memoir

May 13, 2012 | 9 Comments

. . . and what writers rarely admit about rejection & revision I have a lot of friends who are fiction writers, and they all told me that writing a memoir is different—and hard.—Darin Strauss, in The Washington Post Darin Strauss became a memoirist with Half a Life, reviewed here, after publishing three acclaimed novels. I came across his admission above just after a scholar/essayist/travel writer who was visiting our campus told me, when she heard I was writing a …

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Review/Q&A: Alethea Black on ‘Lovely,’ faith & fiction, essays & cutting to bone

April 29, 2012 | 9 Comments

I can only speak for myself, but there’s something about writing at night that feels . . . sneaky. There’s an outlaw quality to it, combined, oddly enough, with a sense of being safe. It has an anaerobic, subterranean feel; it’s as if I’m working beneath the soil, toiling in secret, trying to cultivate something hidden and occult.—Alethea Black, “Essay to be Read at 3 a.m”  I Knew You’d Be Lovely by Alethea Black. Broadway Books, 238 pp. I read …

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Revising, from the top

July 13, 2011 | 10 Comments

Last summer, in Italy, I stood gaping before Michelangelo’s David and reflexively took a photo—no flash, but forgetting that all tourists’ photos of him are banned—and got chastised. Supposedly Michelangelo said he made the immortal statue by just chipping away what didn’t look like David. I’ve thought of writing as having to first create a block of marble, then pounding it into a narrative. Which must be an evident metaphor, because Bill Roorbach mentioned it in his blog’s recent advice …

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Getting words down & revising them

June 27, 2011 | 10 Comments

I can’t remember how I came across a wonderful vimeo video on  Writer Unboxed  by Yuvi Zalkow on his breakthrough in revising his born-dead novel. Zalkow describes himself on vimeo in his “failed writer series” as a “writer, storyteller, novelist, shame-ridden schmo, maker of online presentations about my failures (and occasional successes) as a writer.” I can relate, having just had a great essay (trust me!) fail to win two contests and get rejected even as a submission. That’s what …

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Q&A: Ira Sukrungruang

January 13, 2011 | 4 Comments

The writer discusses craft & his memoir Talk Thai. Following my review of Talk Thai: Adventures of Buddhist Boy, I emailed some questions to its author. Ira Sukrungruang responded with uncommonly helpful answers. He’s only thirty-four, but maybe that’s why: he’s been writing seriously since he was a senior in college and is still close enough to what he’s learned, his big breakthroughs, to help illuminate writing’s craft. Here are my questions and his answers: Q: On your blog you …

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Dinty W. Moore: revise & discover

September 9, 2010 | 3 Comments

“Too often, in my opinion, beginning writers focus on what point they want to make, what the message will be in their writing, the ‘theme’ or ‘thesis,’ whereas the seasoned and successful writers that I know are always after what they can discover. Being too sure of what you want to say from the outset can be a bad thing in writing—you just end up re-stating the obvious.” “If you want to be a writer, you have to love to write, …

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