Sensory Overload

Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season.

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I See Imaginary People

Talking with WNYC newscaster and ‘All Things Considered’ host Amy Eddings recently, I learned that before she became a journalist she used to write fiction. “But my novelist friends talked about hearing the voices of their characters in their heads as they wrote. I never heard those voices,” she said. “That was when I realized [...]

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Writing Tip #4: Advice from Kurt Vonnegut

“Make [your] characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”

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Writer vs. Editor

I used to agonize over each word and phrase in a first draft, doubtful that when I came back to it, weeks or months later, I would be able to see, much less fix, the things that didn’t work. But while I was writing my third novel, The Way Life Should Be – and editing [...]

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Writing Tip #3: Use a Monkey Wrench

When I’m developing a new character I often throw a monkey wrench into the works to create internal tension.  I give this person a trait (an obsession, a habit, a fixation, a physical peculiarity or mannerism) that seems to cut against the grain of his or her personality.  I find that these contradictions usually add [...]

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It’s the Writing, Stupid – Part 2

The words on the page are the only things that count. (See “It’s the Writing, Stupid,” below.) That’s all well and good. But novelist Debra Galant poses an interesting question: what about those non-writing writing days? Does it count, for example, if you’re sketching notes about a character, doing historical research at the library or [...]

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Language Geek, #1: Wendepunkt

Wendepunkt is a German word that means turning point.  In Modernism, Ray Bradbury defines wendepunkt as the moment in a novel “in which there is an unexpected yet in retrospect not unmotivated turn of events, a reorientation which one can see now is not only wholly consistent but logical and possibly even inevitable.”  This moment [...]

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Novel on the Brain

When I am working – really working – on a novel, I only pretend to be human. Though I may act relatively normal, in actuality I have transformed into an enormous, squishy head attached to a floaty, immaterial body, useful only because it transports my head around.  Everything I come into contact with gets absorbed [...]

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Writing Tip #2: Four Basic Elements

A novelist friend has an index card with these four words on it taped to the wall above the computer in his study: CHARACTER CONFLICT CHOICES CONSEQUENCES Sometimes it helps to remember: it’s that simple.

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A Not-Writing Lesson

Thursday, 11:15 a.m.  The phone rings.  I look up from my writing and squint at Caller ID:  PUBLIC SCHOOLS.  And just like that, my work day is over. In the office of the school nurse at Hillside Elementary School, Eli sits slumped in a chair, his face pale, pupils dilated.  His forehead is hot.  “He’s [...]

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Writing Tip #1: Use the Five Senses Right Away

The problem of beginning … The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a story (or a chapter or a scene) you should use all five sentences right at the start, [...]

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Deny the Accident

Jackson Pollock once said, in answer to an interviewer’s question about how he composed his paintings out of “accidental” splatterings, “I don’t use the accident.  I deny the accident.” The sheer bravado of this is thrilling, and as a writer I find it a useful way to think about my work-in-progress.  When I’m putting words [...]

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It's the Writing, Stupid

Even if you waste the entire day running errands and responding to “fire drills,” as my husband calls last-minute, drop-everything requests (which for me might range from picking a sick kid up from school to reading page proofs), you can redeem the day if, at some point – for fifteen minutes or an hour – [...]

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The Artist’s Eye

Recently, in an impulsive moment, I offered to do the flower arrangements for a big party for a close friend. Other than cutting off the ends of the stems when you bring them home and avoiding spray-painted carnations, I don’t know much about flowers, but I figured how hard can it be? Then the teak [...]

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