My Words Fly Up
The Temptation of the Book You’re Not Writing
An essay about writing by Ann Patchett has stuck with me for several years. In the essay, Patchett described how a new book idea would glimmer in front of her like an iridescent butterfly. She knew the book would be just as beautiful. But in order to write the book, she had to grab the
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
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.