My Words Fly Up
A Tale of Two Books
A couple of years ago, I started a book that is a sort-of sequel of an earlier book. I knew my main character but wasn’t sure what the story should be about, so it wasn’t surprising I kept running into dead ends. Every time I hit one, I went back and tried a different beginning,
Contribution
My mother asked me a few weeks ago if I would make a contribution to her newest book. She was writing a piece about wind for it, and she remembered that I had once fictionalized an experience my family had with a tornado. I sent her what I had written—it’s actually the prologue of my
The End
I did not type those actual words, The End, to the final page of my manuscript, but I did finish the book. And rather abruptly, as it turns out. Last week, the morning I left for my annual visit to my mother’s summer place in Maine, I spent an hour or so adding necessary information
So Close
When I last wrote about my current novel in progress, Time Passages, I was taking a pause before the final round of revisions. I am now so close to finishing. Not that it has been easy. Well, some of it was easy. Obvious spots where I got too wordy, scenes where a character acted, um,
Building Characters
I was reminded in class the other day of a writing exercise that I call Building Characters. The idea came to me from a chapter in a student’s memoir, about a bus trip her family took in Great Britain and Western Europe in the early 1960s. The group was an intriguing collection of characters—starting with
“I’m Doing the Best I Can”
For my birthday last year, a friend gave me a book, one that I probably would not have bought for myself because it’s a memoir. I don’t tend to read memoirs. But I loved the title: All the Way to the Tigers. Who wouldn’t be intrigued? And the author’s name rang a bell—Mary Morris. I
Be Social
MY WORDS FLY UP
In which I blog about the days I write and the days I don’t write; about teaching about writing; about reading (which is never enough); and occasionally about music, because sometimes a three-minute song can tell as good a story as a novel.