Of the total creative effort represented in a finished work, 75 percent or more of a writer’s labor goes into designing story. Who are these characters? What do they want? Why do they want it? How do they go about getting it? What stops them? What are the consequences? Finding the answers to these grand [...]
My writing teacher Laurel Yourke recently recommended that those of us in her novel workshop read Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting (HarperEntertainment, 1997). She said it’s perhaps the best book she’s ever read on writing fiction of any kind.
I’ve just started it, and agree with Laurel that it’s profound, [...]
It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible,
Prodigal Summer, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and [...]
According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own little lame march to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw. [...]
Staging, you might argue,
is the poetry of action and setting
when it evokes the otherwise unstated.
Charles Baxter, from The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot
This may be the most succinct statement I’ve ever encountered of the purpose and power of stage business in fiction. I’ll be sticking a Post-It to my computer screen as I sit down [...]
But now a knocking at the door was heard, and such a rush immediately ensued that she with laughing face and plundered dress was borne towards it the center of a flushed and boisterous group, just in time to greet the father, who came home attended by a man laden with Christmas toys and presents. [...]
It was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even [...]
There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness [...]
Over the river, and through the wood,
trot fast my dapple gray!
Spring over the ground like a hunting-hound!
For ’tis Thanksgiving Day. …
Over the river, and through the wood-
now Grandmothers cap I spy!
Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done?
Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!
From the poem “A Boy’s Thanksgiving,” published in 1844
by Lydia Maria Child, journalist, writer [...]
“Tata Jesus is Bangala!” declares the Reverend every Sunday at the end of his sermon. More and more, mistrusting his interpreters, he tries to speak in Kikongo. He throws back his head and shouts these words to the sky, while his lambs sit scratching themselves in wonder. Bangala means something precious and dear. But the [...]