It all started with the decision to scrub the shower.
Despite having a water softener and using Iron Out religiously, it still gets iron stains. So I donned my Nyplex gloves and started in with the cleanser.
Then my hand, and the tile it was scrubbing, went through the wall.
The rest of the saga isn’t important (though [...]
I’ve been feverishly working on the novel, and while that’s my inclination anyway, there’s a certain heightened state of energy and attention I only get when I’m under a deadline. I’m enjoying such a heightened state right now: the first section of this new book is due to my critique group on Monday.
Part of using [...]
It was a dumb thing to do but it wasn’t that dumb. There hadn’t been any trouble out at the lake in years. And it was so exquisitely far from the rest of my life.
from Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
Talk about a great hook: Sunshine, the eponymous protagonist and first-person narrator of McKinley’s first book for [...]
Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor at the online magazine Slate, announced this week that she’s going to write a novel online this month:
When we were told to take time off from our everyday beats to do some kind of ambitious, long-form journalism, my first instinct naturally was to do something legal. Then I thought I’d [...]
My son’s team played its last game of the season last night. It was perfect weather: mid-seventies, breezy enough that the mosquitoes didn’t plague us. There were enough puffy clouds at the horizon to enhance the sunset. And the boys won, securing first place in their division.
A spirit of good humor hung over the ball [...]
In the above video (released by HarperCollins and found on The Daily Beast’s Book Beast section), successful mystery writers Linda Fairstein and Jane Stanton Hitchcock discuss, among other things, whether they know the ending of their story–whodunnit–when they begin.
Guess what? One does and one doesn’t.
So it goes with writing advice. What works for one writer [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]