My Words Fly Up
Writing a Different Mystery
A few months ago, I posted that I was going to write a mystery. I had decided to take the rather unwieldly general-fiction novel I was writing and recast it as a mystery. I did some research, since the book would deal in part with spies during World War II and the Cold War, and
From Screenplay to Film
I posted several months ago about how one of my students went from a short story to a screenplay, coauthoring the screenplay with a friend of hers, Mark Battle. Mark is a filmmaker, and they have now gone from screenplay to film. During the summer Mark gathered a cast and crew and a 1991 Toyota
Writing by Committee
In one of my advanced classes, three of the four students have been in class together for a few years. The fourth student joined more than a year ago. So they are all deeply familiar with one another’s novels (as am I, of course). One of the students, Brian, has been working on a marvelous,
Writing a Mystery
I have always loved mysteries. Maybe it’s because my favorite book when I was ten or so was Harriet the Spy. Actually, Mary Stewart’s romantic suspense novels, which a friend of my mother’s introduced me to when I was in my teens, were what really hooked me. I clearly recall walking to my local bookstore
Kairos
In the August 30, 2015, issue of the New York Times, an essay in the Magazine section caught my attention. Called “Standstill,” by Sam Anderson, it is an essay about “the political world’s obsession with the moment.” Acknowledging that modern humans weren’t the first to consider “the moment,” Anderson looks back to the Greeks to
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.