Tag Archive for ‘Craft of Writing’ 
The Wednesday Web Browser for Writers
Quotation of the Week: Roger Ebert
“When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thoughts fall aside and it is all just there. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.”
–Roger Ebert
Source: “Roger Ebert on Writing: !5 Reflections from Life Itself,” TheAtlantic.com. For more about Ebert’s new memoir, see Harvey Freedenberg’s review for Bookreporter.
Thursday Work-in-Progress: Starting a New Short Story
It has taken me a couple of months, but I think that I’m finally ready to reframe these Thursday blog posts. Instead of sharing tidbits from the post-publication phase of my story collection, Quiet Americans, I’m going to focus on new work-in-progress: fiction, poetry, book reviews, essays, and freelance assignments. Assignments, drafts, revisions, submissions, applications, and so forth. The possibilities are, as they say, limitless.
I’m still home on medical leave this week, but I’ve had somewhat more energy, and I have been able to spend some decent chunks of time reading text longer than a magazine article and writing text longer than a tweet. My main accomplishment is a completed first draft of a new short story.
This isn’t just any short story. This is my first commissioned short story, and the commission seems to have resulted from the “commissioner” having read Quiet Americans. I don’t want to say too much about the project, because I am superstitious. Until the story is out there for you to enjoy, I don’t want to give too many details.
But I will say something about the process of writing this draft. Continue reading ›
The Wednesday Web Browser for Writers
Quotation of the Week: Barbara Kingsolver
For a story to make the cut I asked a lot from it – asked of it, in fact, what I ask of myself when I sit down to write, and that is to get straight down to it and carve something hugely important into a small enough amulet to fit inside a reader’s most sacred psychic pocket. I don’t care what it’s about, as long as it’s not trivial. I once heard a writer declare from a lectern: “I write about the mysteries of the human heart, which is the only thing a fiction writer has any business addressing.” And I thought to myself, Excuse me? I had recently begun thinking of myself as a fiction writer and was laboring under the illusion that I could address any mystery that piqued me, including but not limited to the human heart, human risk factors, human rights….The business of fiction is to probe the tender spots of an imperfect world, which is where I live, write and read.
–Barbara Kingsolver
Source: Kingsolver’s introduction to Best American Short Stories 2001, ed. Katrina Kenison, Barbara Kingsolver (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), pp. xvii-xix.
