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Tap Dancing on the Beach
Hooray and congratulations! It's pub day for Debra Galant, whose new novel, Cars from a Marriage, "delivers wit, charm and characters who feel like next-door neighbors," according to Booklist. So why...
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Five Ways to Jumpstart a Revision
A page from James Michener's rough draft of his novel The Covenant This week I’m working on revising fiction with my undergraduate and grad students at Fordham. Below are some of the tips and ideas...
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Get Inspired!
Recently I shared some exercises I use with my students at Fordham for revising fiction and narrative nonfiction. But a lot of us need inspiration at the other end of the process, too -- right at the...
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Permission to Write
The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, photo by Bernard Handzel A small, bare room. An old lamp, an upholstered chair, a wooden desk by the window. Cows and trees beyond. No papers to grade, no...
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Inventing Characters from History
When novelist Laurie Albanese and art historian Laura Morowitz began collaborating on a novel about the 15th-century painter Fra Filippo Lippi, they discovered that their biggest challenge was to make...
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What We Don’t Know We Know
The novelist Gayle Brandeis wrote about a traumatic and terrible event. And then it happened to her in real life. Several months ago, as I was proofreading my new novel, Delta Girls, a sentence I...
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How Do You Become Someone Else?
The writer Elizabeth Strout, explaining what it's like to write from the point of view of an irascible retired schoolteacher in her 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Olive Kitteridge: "I actually see...
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Great Writing
Justin Kramon didn’t think he was qualified to call himself a writer. And then he thought about his favorite books, and had a change of heart: For some reason, I used to have the perception that...
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Beast of Burden
You may have noticed that I haven't posted much lately. Keeping a blog is like having a pet -- it requires constant maintenance. And when I wasn't deep into writing my novel, I derived a lot of...
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Nothing is Ever Lost
In which the writer Mark Trainer explains how old ideas can spring to life when you least expect it: One of my writing teachers way back when, George Garrett, used to say of being a writer, "Nothing is...
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