Memories

The sound of rain woke me up this morning and for a moment I was about ten years old and I was exultant because rainy summer days were very rare where I lived. On a rainy summer day, I was not required to go outside and play. I could stay inside and read book and…

I originally conceived of Lucinda (from The Wanderer) as a younger character who has a kind of naïve faith that things will work out. Possibly this is because I started writing her years ago when I had a kind of naïve faith that things would work out. But as Lucinda’s story evolved from a simpler…

Welcome to the Dojo Wisdom for Writers Book Club! Every Wednesday, we meet to discuss one of the lessons in Dojo Wisdom for Writers. We’ll go in order, so it’s easy enough to follow along. Read the lesson, then read the blog post, then comment in the comments! Do feel free to comment on each…

“Never trust a storyteller,” Jonathan Gottschall says in The Story Paradox. There are a number of reasons he says this but primary among them is that we’re always manipulating the story for maximum effect. We think about what details to emphasize and which to downplay. We spend a lot of time deciding which rock will…

When I started writing The Wanderer, I wanted to share my love for Old English literature and language but I’ve also been a writer and editor long enough to know that a strict adherence to the truth makes for poor storytelling. Fiction that is too self-conscious is metafiction, a story about story, or a story…

I started this morning trying to remember the phrase for “quotation marks.” I came up with “word hole.” Which, in fact, is a perfect description of how I feel about my current work-in-progress, an apparently neverending story that just isn’t quite there yet. All the words go in and nothing comes out. Well, not yet….