A good friend has dubbed it “The September Silence” — that time each year that I take a social media break in order to pretend the weather is cooler in Texas and turn my focus even more toward writing. At 11:57 p.m. on August 31, I logged out of all social media apps. And just […]
Archives for 2015
A Matter of Interpretation
When Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” was taught to me, it was as though only the last three lines existed: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Out of context, it looks like it’s a poem about enjoying […]
Writing about Reading
A couple weeks ago, I read an article on The Nation website called The Democracy of Difficult Fiction that I’m still rolling around in my head. I write about reading a fair amount because it’s through reading that I learned the most about writing. I discovered most things about writing through sitting down and doing […]
Finding Writing Focus in a Digital Age
I’ve written about shutting out distractions before. It’s a bit of an obsession with me — especially in a time when we have more things than ever that can be distracting. These things aren’t always bad, even though many make them out to be. Social media is wonderful; when it feels like too much, there’s […]
In Praise of Slow Writing (Part II)
I’m a big fan of slow writing. I love that recent Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner (Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See) was a book that took 10 years to write. A previous winner, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, took a decade as well. (Right now, some NaNoWriMo writers are thinking, “Damn, I’m slowing […]
You Never Know
I listened to Marc Maron’s interview with President Obama on Monday. If you’re not familiar with Marc Maron, here’s a quick version: a stand up comic busts his ass, hosts a show on Comedy Central, but never gets the breaks other comics around him seem to get. Throw in a struggle with addiction, and Maron […]
A Video and a Podcast
Yesterday, I finally watched this interview with Andy Weir (the author of The Martian): Yes, it’s almost an hour, but it’s a good chat! Some of my favorite bits from this interview: Weir serialized The Martian on his website and offered it for free. As its popularity grew, so did interest from agents and publishers. […]
How to Ask for Help
Peter Salerno was my great grandfather. He came to America from Italy with very little and ended up doing well for himself. The quick version goes like this: He went out west and followed cattle trains. He bought cattle, butchered them, and sold the cuts to cowboys. Somewhere along the way, he came in to […]
Roller Coaster Writing
The advice usually goes something like this: Hook your readers with action right from the start, and then…every single word, sentence, paragraph, and page must drive them through more action — until the end, when readers can barely handle any more excitement! I understand wanting to write (and read) something that feels like this: But […]
The Blank Page (That Matters Most)
I listened to this episode of the A Tiny Sense of Accomplishment podcast yesterday. I loved Jess Walter’s point about the importance of the page (as it relates to writing). During a live interview before an audience in Minneapolis, when asked who he writes for, he replied: There was a book a while back in […]
All the Things
This week, I seem to have bumped into articles and videos about how multitasking and other hurried methods of producing usually have a negative effect on production…or it’s just where my mind is at this week and those articles stood out more. (My guess: the latter situation.) Sometimes I think about moving on to a […]
Surrounding Yourself (with Writing)
One of my favorite podcasts is Otherppl with Brad Listi. (If fact, it’s the only podcast to which I’ve subscribed to premium content; after all, it’s less than $10.00/year.) I love the way Listi digs and gets writers to talk not just about their writing in ways they usually don’t discuss, but their lives and […]
The Forged Work of a Lifetime
Reading this piece about John Steinbeck during lunch yesterday got me thinking about what is lost in one’s pursuit of what they love doing when bound by other things. Before getting to that, though, a bit about Steinbeck’s writing. There is Something More, Here I’ve mentioned plenty of times that I came to literary/contemporary literature […]