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Joyce, Wallace, Woolf and More Wrote in Fractals
Posted on April 5, 2016 Leave a Comment
For writers who never did well in math, you might be surprised to learn that literature contains fractals. Fractals are geometric figures made of small components that have statistical characteristics identical to the whole. If you zoom in on a fractal, you see the same shapes again and again no matter how far you zoom […]
Know More
Posted on January 26, 2016 1 Comment
“You should know more than what you put on the page. The reader can sense that.” — Susan Orlean Credit: Tim Green / Flickr Creative Commons
The Year of Reading Women
Posted on December 13, 2015 1 Comment
There’s an important essay going around that, if you haven’t read it yet, you should read now before finishing this post. It’s called On Pandering by Claire Vaye Watkins, who is known to me by her fantastic 2013 debut collection of short stories, Battleborn, which won five literary awards. The essay is actually a speech […]
How to Make Your Writing as Good as Your Ambition
Posted on November 12, 2013 1 Comment
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has […]
Cafe Sounds for Creativity
Posted on August 11, 2013 6 Comments
One of the first posts I wrote here had to do with finding the right place to write. For me, that meant sitting in the library. But after a few months, my creative juices dried up. I think the space was too quiet. So then I got a desk for the bedroom at home and […]
The Quiet Solitude of Writing Away
Posted on August 28, 2012 2 Comments
Last week I spent my time in Provincetown, Ma., at the Fine Arts Work Center. I was there to attend a workshop taught by Pam Houston. But I think I was also there to see what it was like to get away and write. I’m considering applying to some residencies and I thought my time […]
Read Your Sentences Aloud
Posted on August 16, 2012 2 Comments
I read this post from a friend of mine and was reminded of something John Cheever wrote in the forward to his collection of stories. He said, “My favorite stories are those that were written in less than a week and that were often composed aloud.” At about the same time that a read that […]
Embrace the Fiction of All Things
Posted on August 13, 2012 3 Comments
There was a wonderful essay in the New Yorker this past week, written by Keith Ridgway. Ridgway is a Dublin-born writer and author of six books, including one collection of short stories. He begins the essay, “Everything is Fiction,” by saying, “I don’t know how to write.”
Don’t Get Trapped in the Blogmire
Posted on June 28, 2012 2 Comments
I’ve only been writing this blog for about five weeks now, give or take a few days. And in that time, I’ve noticed something a little disconcerting. People — by that, I mean “writers” — are spending too much time writing blog posts or reading other blogs — so much time that it’s distracting them […]
Data Mine the Work
Posted on June 26, 2012 4 Comments
Yesterday in my post, The Exploratory Draft, I mentioned the interview I read in The Writer with Adam Johnson. Johnson, like many writers, believes that successful stories come out of hard work. You have to put in the hours. He writes at least 1,000 words per day and he keeps track of his progress in […]
Tracy Staedter 