Category Archives: working method
Showalter: memoir is a ‘radical act’
My interview with Shirley Hershey Showalter concludes with her discussion of her writing process and of her vision for the potential for memoir, a “radical act,” to build peace in the world. Q: You prepared for writing a memoir by … Continue reading
Filed under author interview, memoir, poetry, spirituality, working method
Finding her memoir’s ‘topic sentence’
I want to prepare for the hour of my death by living one good day at a time. And I want to help others to do the same. —Shirley Hershey Showalter’s mission statement Shirley Showalter is an essayist, blogger, speaker, … Continue reading
Filed under author interview, electronic publishing, memoir, spirituality, working method
Shirley Showalter, ubuntu & memoir
Become an observer of your own creative process. It will help you uncover where you “sing” and where your voice falls flat. When you lose track of time and are not thinking about yourself at all but rather about your … Continue reading
Filed under electronic publishing, memoir, MFA, NOTED, spirituality, teaching, working method
Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for writers
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. 2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. 3. Every character … Continue reading
Filed under Dillard—Saint Annie, emotion, NOTED, structure, working method
Kurt Vonnegut on making art
There’s a swell book that’s out of print now. Maybe Seven Stories will bring it out again. It’s called The Writer and Psychoanalysis by a man who’s now dead named Edmund Bergler. He claimed he had treated more writers than anyone else … Continue reading
Filed under NOTED, working method
Q&A: a memoirist’s decade of discovery
Nina Hamberg, whose award-winning book Grip: A Memoir of Fierce Attractions I recently excerpted, answered questions about her motives and process. In the manner of Tobias Wolff’s great memoirs, Grip’s meaning is embedded in its story. A narrative of Hamberg’s … Continue reading
Filed under author interview, memoir, working method, workshopping
Noted: William T. Vollmann
I believe in the American myth that it is both admirable and even possible to devote one’s life to a private dream. The probability of failing oneself, either through laziness, incompetence or bad luck, or else, worse yet, through dreaming … Continue reading
Filed under fiction, journalism, NOTED, syntax, working method
The 10,000-hour rule of thumb
Listen, do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell? Closer, let me whisper in your ear . . . —“Do You Want to Know a Secret,” from Please Please Me, 1963 By the time the … Continue reading
Filed under immersion, NOTED, working method
The Beatles were all about this
For Meg The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, … Continue reading
Filed under essay-collage, essay-lyric, music, MY LIFE, NOTED, working method
