Category: Writer’s Blog
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Judith Viorst on Writing
Read Jessica Goldstein’s engaging interview with Judith Viorst in the Sept 1 issue of The Washington Post. Here are my favorite excerpts: “‘I am obnoxiously disciplined,’ said Viorst… Viorst gives herself quotas. She polishes the pages. She tells the children whose classrooms she visits that ‘I’m not a writer. I’m a rewriter. I go over…
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Exformation
“…great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication theorists sometimes call exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.” –David Foster Wallace…
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Slicing a Yam
Yes, I collect beautiful sentences. Here are two from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. One character describing the way another character speaks: “It reminded him of slicing a yam with a newly sharpened knife, the easy perfection in every slice.” Describing how a boy from a rural village describes his first sight of the larger, affluent town:…
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Accidents and Obsessions
“I never purposely thought I was making a movie that was any more commercial than any of the other ones. I was just accidentally obsessed with something that was appealing to more people.” John Waters on Hairspray in an interview in The Washington Post (1/19/13). My italics. Love the way he puts this. Reminds me…
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Hearing through New Ears
At the 2013 Golden Globes, Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained) thanked a group of friends to whom he reads his scenes aloud. “You don’t tell me what I’m doing wrong…” he said. “Reading it to you helps me to hear it through your ears.” So important! But kind of hard to find friends who have the…
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What Should I Write?
Writers who want to cross that threshold from amateur to professional often ask whether they should focus their attention on a project that seems marketable or write whatever they want to write. Look at it this way…whatever you write might not get published, even if you believe it is a marketable idea; so why not…
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A Letter to your Children
After giving my SCBWI talk, which included a personal story about how I had wished my mother had written me a letter before she died, I came home and took a walk with my husband along the canal. I spotted this piece of graffiti. I have already written my letters. If you’ve been thinking…
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Stuck?
A student wrote to me saying that she was having trouble with the climax and ending for her story. My advice? Try writing out a simple outline of what happens in the story. Work on that outline so the story make sense and comes to an ending that you like. Don’t write a new scene…
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How to write when your character is a little crazy
I am hard at work on the next novel, and I’m using a different process. Usually I find the voice of the novel first (Is it the voice of the main character? Is it the voice of a narrator?) and then I write my rough draft in the voice. So, I started this project by…