Writing process
The Long and Solitary Trip
Author Dani Shapiro, author of the novels Black & White and Family History, the bestselling memoir Slow Motion, is coming out with a new memoir, this one about her spiritual journey, called Devotion. Recently she wrote a terrific piece in the LA Times about the difficulties facing writers today. I wish I’d written it myself. …
Read MoreThe Mundane & The Sublime
Now and then I get emails from writers who are also recovering alcoholics, asking me whether I found it difficult to write once I got sober. I tell them I did, but then writing’s always difficult. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it (and although some days it feels like everyone IS writing…
Read MoreLiterature's multiple universes
Yesterday I had to make a plot decision in the novel I’m working on. This is something that happens frequently…all the time, in fact. Should a character wander off into the woods? Or should she climb the mountain? Should she open the door? Should he knock again? Kick it down? Should he walk away? Credibility…
Read MoreTraining for intuition
In the last week I’ve had a couple of interesting conversations. I was at a book launch for a poetry collection last week. I won’t name the poet, since I fear my words might offend him, and I am uncomfortable offending folks. The organizer had arranged a panel discussion between poets and scientists, to discuss…
Read MoreWriting as a butterfly net…
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes…
Read MoreThe Truth Has A Price
A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE GLOBE & MAIL: In the New York Times recently, there was a review of a new memoir which is probably going to cause some controversy — Julie Myerson’s Lost Child: A Mother’s Story. In case you missed the firestorm in England when this…
Read MoreWhen you want to give up
There comes a time when every writer wants to give up, to crumple those pages into tight little balls and toss ’em in the basket, or better yet — burn ’em. In fact, when I’m teaching I often tell students this in the first class, so they won’t be blindsided when it happens to them.…
Read MoreThe God of Small Things
“Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.” – William Zinsser A friend of mine is taking a writing class with William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well. I was surprised when she told me several of her classmates quit the class when Zinsser gently insisted on talking about the process of writing,…
Read MoreThe Magic (Music?) of Storytelling
Where do you get your ideas from? How often I’ve been asked that. How do writers begin? How do we get past the surface of the blank page, down to the place Robert Olen Butler calls “From Where You Dream”? Which is the name of his excellent book on the process of writing fiction. In…
Read MoreThe death of my darlings
Editing. If you’re like me, it’s a more pleasurable part of the writing life than facing that blank page every morning, but it’s not without it’s agonies. ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’ – Sir…
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