Short Saturday: The Paradox of Voice
I’ve written some about finding your voice (there are links below). Many people have. And you’ll hear lots of different opinions … which makes it difficult for young or inexperienced writers to figure...
View ArticleStudy This: The Summer Before the War
It’s nearly 500 pages long—and I flew through Helen Simonson’s second novel set in an English village. I never wanted to put it down. Also, it made me angry (on behalf of a character I loved), and it...
View ArticlePossible … Not Probable
Some years ago in a weak moment I fell victim to some mediocre book marketing—“follow-up to the international best-selling Pillars of the Earth!”—and purchased Ken Follett’s World Without End, a one...
View ArticleLooking for Good Writing
How much or how little “natural” ability anyone has is nearly impossible to gauge. When Emily Dickinson composed the lines that filled the pages she kept in her lonely desk, she could not know that her...
View Article#WordUse Series: Words I Never Want to See in Your Novel. Please.
When I get to the end of an edit, I generally make a list of the author’s “favorite” words and phrases—words he or she used over and over without realizing it. It’s quite instructive. Usually they are...
View ArticleStudy This: Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
I’ve already written about The Summer Before the War—which I read first (and which is, in fact, the more accomplished novel)—but I really enjoyed Helen Simonson’s novel-writing skills in Major...
View Article#WhatImReadingNow : Pax
The fox felt the car slow before the boy did, as he felt everything first. Through the pads of his paws, along his spine, in the sensitive whiskers at his wrists. By the vibrations, he learned also...
View Article#WhatImReadingNow: Stoner
Two weeks after that conversation Stoner received a memo from Lomax’s office which informed him that his schedule for the next semester was changed, that he would teach his old graduate seminar on the...
View Article#WhatImReadingNow: The Time Fetch
They walked silently to science class. Edward sat down in the back row and tried to think things through. A few days ago Feenix was a terror, a plague, a human tsunami, and now she was gone. Not only...
View Article#WhatImReadingNow: Good As Gone
Jane woke up and whispered, “Julie?” The room yawned around her. After two years of sleeping alone in her own bedroom in the new house, Jane no longer dreamed of the ceiling fan dropping onto the bed...
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