The Secret to Writing Good Sentences
Lately, I’ve been judging my sentences as too clunky. They get to the point but there’s no inspiration. So I thought about what books in the past inspired me to write interesting sentences. European greats like Tolstoy, Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, James. And then contemporary writers like Anthony Doerr, Richard Ford, Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Don DeLillo, Richard Yates, E.L. Doctorow, Ta Nahesi Coates. Why did I just list all men? There are plenty of women: Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Kingsolver, Tracy Chevalier, Ann Patchett, Alice Munro, Sarah Waters, hell, even…
Can You Be a Writer and Have Kids?
During this last spring break, I took my three children to visit my mother and aunt in Tucson, Arizona. It was a bright, loud, active, social time. We yakked on about everything from politics to the names of my daughter’s new dolls. We went swimming. Drank smoothies. Ate dinner in the warm shade. Broke up arguments about who’d done the right or wrong thing. Walked around the desert. Watched birds. Avoided touching cactuses. Shopped. Cleaned. Laughed. And all else interactive and external. Kids Are Interactive and External While I enjoyed…
Manuscript Feedback That’s Gracious yet Demanding
In an issue of The Writer’s Chronicle from a few years ago, teacher Catherine Wallace wrote an interesting article on how to solicit manuscript feedback from editors, teachers, classmates, friends, family, whomever. She discussed the dangers of fault-finding criticism while outlining what kind of feedback she believes is most helpful. She argues that caring for a manuscript is not unlike raising children: you must praise them for behaving. Otherwise, fault-finding reverses creative momentum. It drives the writer back to what’s already written instead of onward toward the development of the essential vision…
Richard Ford on Writing as an Arrangement of Words
When I debuted this blog, I called it, “An Arrangement of Words.” That’s a phrase Richard Ford once said. It’s a beautiful expression, elegantly encapsulating what we writers do: arrange words to create a world and a truth. But as I realized I wanted to write about more than just my writing passion, I considered other titles for the blog. Finally, I found the theme that displays what I’m all about: cultivating a better life. Anyway, I still love that expression and thought writers might be interested in how I…
