structure

An ancient lesson in structure

September 15, 2011 | 11 Comments

A version of this post first ran October 3, 2008 The King James Bible’s stories and ancient words and lovely turns of phrase have influenced legions of writers. I’m charmed by its liberal use of sobering colons: like so. And by the nonsensical italics. And then there’s Jesus: talk about someone who works on multiple levels. He’s always getting thronged and spied upon—What’s he gonna do now?—and he delights in flummoxing. He speaks in riddles to the dumbfounded masses, though …

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More metaphors & Gail Caldwell

August 11, 2011 | 5 Comments

Still thinking about Gail Caldwell’s deft metaphors in Let’s Take the Long Way Home, I was struck by these remarkable lines by John Steinbeck from The Grapes of Wrath:  Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you can’t. The willow tree is you. The pain on the mattress there—that dreadful pain—that’s you. I sure didn’t remember that passage, and it makes me want to reread the novel, which also has—I do remember this—an amazing scene of several pages …

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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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Q&A: Gregory Orr on ‘The Blessing’

June 2, 2011 | 5 Comments

Orr has distilled the anguish of his youth right down to its holy bones.—Booklist The Blessing: A Memoir by Gregory Orr. Council Oak, 209 pages. Gregory Orr’s The Blessing is one of the finest memoirs I’ve read. There are tons of good memoirs and more than a few great ones, but this one did it for me. It joins a select handful that thrilled me to my toes: Lee Martin’s From Our House, Dinty W. Moore’s Between Panic and Desire, …

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Q&A: Jim Minick on his earthy memoir

May 14, 2011 | 4 Comments

Desiring to grow things is surely in humans’ DNA, planted at least 10,000 years ago in our genetic code, not as old as the impulse to gather wild food, but tenured. As a boy and young man haunted by the loss of our family farm, I devoured back-to-the-land literature for years; then I farmed commercially for over a decade; and I’m now up to my eyeballs in writing my own memoir of rural life. Almost burned out on the genre …

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Agent Betsy Lerner on editing, structure

May 8, 2011 | 9 Comments

The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner. Riverhead, 304 pages I suggest you stalk your demons. The more popular culture and the media fail to present the real pathos of our human struggle, the more opportunity there is for writers. If you have been unable to make your work count or stick, you must grab them by the neck and face them down. And whatever you do, don’t censor yourself. There’s always time and …

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Review: Memoirs by James Michener

March 11, 2011 | No Comments

Sharing this small immense world A guest post by Olga Khotiashova Pilgrimage: A Memoir of Poland and Rome; The World Is My Home: A Memoir Reading The World is My Home by James Michener was a rare case when I read a memoir not being acquainted with the other works of a writer. Well, not exactly. I had already read his Pilgrimage: A Memoir of Poland and Rome and was hooked. As I had known a lot about Poland, it …

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