My family and I spent our Memorial Day weekend up on the roof. Literally. Though the photo above isn’t one of us, you get the idea. The process began on Thursday afternoon, when our shingles and other materials were delivered to the roof. Friday afternoon, the dumpster arrived. And Friday evening, we began tear off [...]
Earlier this week, I linked to several summer reading lists, and today, at the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend, I’ve got some more for you.
First up, Sara Nelson’s “13 Hottest Summer Reads” from the Daily Beast. Her list includes several books mentioned in previous lists, including the latest from Pat Conroy and Stieg Larsson. [...]
In Walter Kirn’s article about writing his new memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever (Doubleday), he critiques critiques memoirs as self-help books disguised as memoir. “I review books as a day job,” Kirn says, “and through the years I’ve come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of [...]
The storyteller’s selection and arrangement of events is his master metaphor for the interconnectedness of all the levels of reality–personal, political, environmental, spiritual. Stripped of its surface of characterization and location, story structure reveals his personal cosmology, his insight into the deepest patterns and motivations for how and why things happen in this world–his map [...]
USA Today’s summer reading list includes South of Broad, the first new novel by Pat Conroy in 14 years. If you enjoy this pick, try his memoir, My Losing Season. And if the second book is anything like the first, I’d skip Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire. The first book featuring this [...]
I’m finding Robert McKee’s distinction between character and characterization helpful as I work on my new novel. According to McKee, “Characterization is the sum of all observable qualities of a human being, everything knowable through careful scrutiny: age and IQ; sex and sexuality; style of speech and gesture; choices of home, car, and dress; education [...]
I love audiobooks.
When I work out, fold laundry, weed the flower bed, cook supper, chances are I’m listening to an audiobook on my MP3 player. I’ve even been known to listen while grocery shopping.
I only listen to unabridged books, but beyond that, the range of what I’ll listen to is broader than the range of [...]
I’ll use just about any excuse for new books, and Mother’s Day was no exception. So after a nice dinner out on Saturday night, my husband turned me loose in the bookstore. I did my best to keep the total reasonable, and still managed to walk away with four books:
Since I only pull my Riverside [...]
I check in regularly at Barnes & Noble Studio to check out interviews with writers. In the interview above, noted fiction writer Ethan Canin, author of The Palace Thief, For Kings and Planets and, most recently, America, America, talks about the books that made him want to become a writer.
For me, the list includes everything [...]
What’s the starting point of a particular story?
Is it the earliest point in chronology? Is it somewhere in the middle of the action? Is it a point beyond the end of the story to be told, a point of perspective from which a narrator can relate something that once happened? And how do you know?
I [...]