In January of ’84, after a decent winter break between college semesters, I was excited and nervous about something new in my college schedule – theater. Not theater from a book but more like an intro to acting. I had always loved movies and plays, but I had never actually done anything towards joining a…
When I took a graduate class called “Writing the Novel” a few years ago, I learned two very important things. First, if you tell a writer that her work in progress is a romance novel when she thinks she’s writing literary fiction, be prepared to see a chair fly across the room. Second, there’s something…
Either late in high school or early in college, I was ordered to read The Great Gatsby. I regarded it as the most boring thing I had ever picked up. However, roughly 20 years later, I decided that it may have been me who was boring, so I decided – through the recommendation of others…
I’m having a little trouble with something, but I can’t tell you what. Let me be more specific. I’m working on a short story, but I’m not sure if something is clear that needs to be clear. It’s a story about two regular, average kids in a regular, average, middle-American town. However, there’s something a…
Hey, last week, did you wish a happy birthday to Stephen King? He writes a LOT, but does that make him great writer? If I eat a lot, does that make me a great eater? Nobody can take away his originality, that’s for sure. He blazed some new literary trails, but I kind of expected…
I’ve said that there’s no reason to write a story without a plot because you literally can make a plot of anything. It’s really not hard. Why did Jeff get a wrong-number phone call asking for Kevin? Is Pat’s wife cheating on him? You don’t need anything more. Jeff, Who Lives at Home was written…
As if writing a book review isn’t hard enough, it’s even harder when you didn’t really like the book and you try your best to sound fair and you’re not disliking it’s about a war and you’re very anti-war. It gets even harder still when the book seems to be high up on many people’s…
The writing process – step 1: pre-writing. It starts with a thought, an inspiration, an event that makes me say, “What would happen if…?” In the case of this story, which has a working title of The Connection, it began with a tragedy. There was a plane crash last year involving a charter flight that…
