Category: Writer’s Blog
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Getting Out of the Way
“I don’t know [expletive] about words. The reason the language comes out that way is, it’s me just trying to get out of the way.” This provocative quote from Irish playwright Enda Kenny (from a recent Washington Post article by Peter Marks) speaks to an important concept that I am continually stressing to students. Writing…
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What is the Weirdest Thing?
When Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief and editor-in-chief of One Story Magazine, gets bored writing, she doesn’t ask, “What happens next?” She asks herself this question: “What’s the weirdest thing that can happen right now?” At this year’s AWP conference, Tinti said that you don’t want weirdness for the sake of weirdness, but…
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Procrastination
Do you procrastinate? Here’s a clever solution. According to James Surowiecki in his New Yorker article on procrastination, Victor Hugo would write in the nude and tell his valet not to give him any clothes until he finished for the day. Of course, in order for such a plan to work, one would need a…
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The Writer’s Notebook: Don’t Leave Home Without It!
“Inside Sedaris’s left shirt pocket, he keeps an omnipresent notebook, a little spiral-bound one, in which he writes down everything that happens that might later be of use. If he walks out of the house and realizes he’s forgotten it, he turns around and goes home. “I might see a worm attacking a centipede. I…
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The Need for Obstacles
One of the recurring problems I see when I’m critiquing a story is the lack of an obstacle or nemesis. William Gibson calls it “the barrier” in his excellent book about writing titled Shakespeare’s Game. Something must get in the way of the main character’s yearning or else there is no tension and ultimately no…
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Matilda on the Need for Humor
In Matilda, Roald Dahl’s characters discuss the need for humor in children’s books; Matilda begins: “I think Mr. C.S. Lewis is a very good writer. But he has one failing. There are no funny bits in his books.” “You are right there,” Miss Honey said. “There aren’t many funny bits in Mr. Tolkien either,” Matilda…
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Learning from a Master
Let’s say you’re reading a book, and you come across a sentence that blows you away because of its poetry or cadence or economy or expansiveness. Mark it. Then at some point, come back and don’t just read it again. Write that sentence down in your writer’s notebook, word for word, comma for comma. In…
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What did I learn?
If you want to learn something, one of the best ways to do it is to be conscious of what you are learning. That may sound ridiculously obvious, but life has a way of flooding the mind with too much information and sweeping the newly-learned or almost-learned stuff out to sea. The best way for…
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How to Read a Novel
One of the students in my Fiction for Young Readers class asked what she should focus on when she’s reading the novels I assigned. First of all, I read for enjoyment, of course; but I do analyze books as I read, and I do it on two basic levels. Think of a house. You’ve got…
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Boys on the Brain
I’m riding on the metro, writing up my syllabus for a graduate course that I’ll be teaching (Fiction for Young Readers) at Johns Hopkins University; and I’m working on my lesson called “Audience: Age and Gender” when two boys hop on. Their moms quickly take a seat and chat. Although plenty of seats are free,…