Here is one of the secret ironies of being a published author: As you move toward launching a book, your writing life is decimated. Those quiet, searching hours of half-starts and rambling experiments, those blessed days of research and play and discovery, those driving weeks of inspiration—as well as months of paralyzing self-doubt that this …
This Christmas my mother gave me a fantastic, hilarious collection of poems called God Got a Dog. In one, God goes to beauty school, falls in love with nails, and opens a manicure parlor. The poems are deceptively simple. Theologically, they’re out in left field, playing with our notions of holiness and embodiment and images …
Pigeon Holes: How Labels Hurt Writers and Writing Read More »
A heartfelt thanks to Elizabeth Fletcher for inviting me to participate in The Next Big Thing, an internet-age ponzi scheme to connect writers to one another. Creative projects incubate in privacy for SO LONG; it’s a relief to get a public glimpse of a work-in-progress—almost a confirmation that it exists. I imagine all the contributors to …
My mother’s greatest fear for me as a writer is that I’ll never stop revising. When beginning writers learn about revision they always ask, “How do you know when to stop?” My mother, and possibly these students, view revision as a path to perfection—which we know is endless and packed with illusions. I prefer thinking …
In a minute you’ll read a writing exercise you’ll hate. Your hackles will rise and a bitter taste will fill your mouth. Every bone in your body will resist it. Here’s my challenge: Do it anyway. A first draft is a beautiful thing. Drafts are well worth growing attached to; they have raw energy, bursts …
Mark Doty, in a class on writing memoir, said that three forces are at play in any personal narrative: the spoken, the unspoken, and the unspeakable. The dynamic between these triune forces is what gives a story life. As I understand it, the spoken force consists of the words on the page—that is, the story …
Whenever I begin to work with a writer on his or her project, I always ask two questions. The first is “Why are you writing this?” The answers I get are often similar—“Because I learned things from my experience I want to share with others”; “Because it’s good therapy”; “Because the world needs to hear …
Carol Bly wrote that the essential question we must ask during what she calls “the long middle stage” of writing is, “What more do I have to say about this topic?” Certainly this is a good question to ask early on, when we’ve completed a draft and are unsure where to go next. Usually we’re …
The handiest revision tool I know is an empty notebook. Even the presence of that notebook, silent and full of potential in my desk drawer, influences my writing. Why? Because those empty pages, which I’m saving for the purpose of “seeing my subject anew,” exert the same creative potential as the empty pages of my …
Lately I’ve been feeling like a revision evangelical. The majority of my teaching time is spent converting beginning and intermediate writers into revisers—that is, into writers who labor beyond their rough drafts into more and more mature versions, taking their creative ideas through the paces of the writing process until they become polished work. Learning …