Vivid. Compelling. And completely unsuitable for use in your novel. What can you do with a memory or detail that’s too resonant to part with? Adam Gopnik’s essay introducing The Best American Essays 2008 is still on my mind, and it gave me the answer: Deploy it in an essay.
Some of my most vivid memories [...]
Snow is falling at the rate of more than an inch an hour, and has been since about midnight. So we’ve already got a good ten inches with a few more hours of snow to come before it tapers off. My daughter is still sleeping, blissfully unaware of the snow day. My son got up [...]
Motivation, inspiration were not the problem …. The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down [...]