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The Fragile Scaffolding of a Writer's Life
. For many years now I have been in the habit of writing daily. It is the first thing I do each morning after waking and getting coffee from the bedroom coffee maker. I do not leave the room. I do not...
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What kind of books do you write?
When I am out and about in the world (on planes and trains; at conferences and social gatherings; when talking to students, strangers, or casual acquaintances) this is a very common question. And it is...
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Handling a Writer's Affliction: Excessive Self-consciousness
Last week I attended a talk given by the Swedish novelist Anne Sward, author most recently of Breathless(yes, just like the Goddard film). During the Q&A period Sward briefly addressed what happens...
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The Best Death?
When my mother died a little over a year ago I was 3,000 miles away. She died unexpectedly one night in her sleep, we believe, at her home in Massachusetts. I was in Oregon, scheduled to visit her the...
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Writers Looking for Readers
I am posting below the letter that came today from the Authors Guild regarding Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads. It is hard, as an author, not to get really riled about this issue. The publication...
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A Writer Thinking About Reading
I was in a small group of women recently where all (but me) said they were not readers. This is not something a writer likes to hear. A writer likes to think that the world is heavily populated with...
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Is a Novel a Story?
In the last couple of years, since I’ve been teaching screenwriting, I’ve been thinking obsessively about story design. Writing a good film is all about creating an airtight story that has the feeling...
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Why We Write...
The following quote from Jose Rivera about writing plays could be said about any kind of writing:“You write because you want to show something. For instance, you write ‘to show that the world is shit.’...
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Writers Saying No, Carving Out Time, and Venturing (Occasionally) from the Cave
Last weekend on a panel at a writer’s conference in Eugene, Karen Karbo, a terrifically funny writer and person, recommended that writers examine “the number of things we do that don’t need to be...
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Who Are You Out There?—An Invitation to Writers and Readers
I have been blogging for three years now, since May of 2010, just after I returned from a trip to Zimbabwe. When I began I was quite sporadic, and there was almost a full year when I hardly posted...
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Can A Writer (any writer) Stop Writing?
Most writers have, at some point along the way, wished the compulsion to write would go away. Writing frequently keeps us from seeing friends, from exercising as much as we’d like to, from creating...
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Novels and The Inner Life
The quote below from Richard Bausch, which appeared yesterday on Facebook, has really spoken to me. Novels are an avenue into the interior life of human beings, their private ways of thinking and...
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Naked on the Page
I’ve been thinking about actors of late, since my partner recently acted in August: Osage County (the terrific play by Tracy Letts).I have often felt relieved that I am a writer and not an actor....
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Writer as Citizen: Good or Bad?
My partner and I recently went to the coast for a long weekend of writing. He was working on a new play. I was working on a new novel. Both of us are hoping to finish these projects by the year's end,...
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The Power of Silence
Sometimes—most of the time—I think there is too much verbiage in the world, too many people talking and writing, on TV, on the internet, in newspapers and periodicals and books. Everywhere I go I am...
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A Stop on the NORTHWEST WRITERS BLOG TOUR
1) What am I working on?I’ve just completed a new novel called Weather Woman, the story of a meteorologist working at a small Southern New Hampshire TV station who discovers she has the power to...
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#amwriting--BUT WHAT?!
I have been out of the blogosphere for a number of months now, but I haven’t been idle. I’ve been finishing a novel, Weather Woman, rewriting said novel, and now getting it out into the world....
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A Writer in Cyberspace
I have recently, apprehensively, begun exploring Twitter. A few years ago I got an account and tweeted a few times and then withdrew in a panic. I had no idea what I was doing there, or who I wanted to...
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Writers Helping Writers
Last week I was up in Portland recording a podcast on Late Night Library with poet Dorianne Laux. Late Night Library is the brainchild of University of Oregon MFA graduates Paul Martone (fiction) and...
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Channeling Nora
It is hard to believe that Nora Ephron is dead. She was too full of vitality to die—and much too funny. If anyone could outwit death I’d cast my vote with her.There is much to celebrate about a...
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What Good is Fiction?
One of the best responsibilities of being a writer is having to read. Why must we read? Because in reading we writers join a conversation with our peers, living and dead. We study the way other writers...
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New York Streets
I am writing from New York City now, my home for over a decade and the place I always thought would be my permanent home. Life offers up unexpected twists and turns, and I was dragged reluctantly away...
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Let the Summer Begin
August 15thhas come and gone. It is always around now that I begin to mourn the vanishing summer. Leaves of our apple tree have begun falling onto the patio, and back-to-school ads lurk behind every...
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Things
In the wake of my mother’s death I’ve been thinking a lot about objects. This is in part because boxes of her things have been shipped to me—dishes, jewelry, stacks of old photos and albums—and it has...
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The Loop of Language
A few years ago I began noticing that clerks, receptionists, gas station attendants—generally all the strangers I encountered in the course of a day—were attaching possessive pronouns to their parting...
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