Broken & Beautiful: How the Light Gets In
The funny thing is that, wrong as we are, we do belong here, and wrong as our work may be, it belongs as well. Everything is cracked, and everything is beautiful.
Revision
Undoing the Single Story
Revision insists that we reject the single story in favor of layered, complex, and contradictory stories. Just as intimacy and awareness break down our stereotypes, intimacy with and awareness of our material break apart our over-simplifications and half-truths.
The Story Comes First
I’m increasingly convinced that what makes writing (both the process and the product) valuable is its service to the story. Nothing else satisfies in the end—not success, not recognition, not extraordinary craft accomplishments, certainly not money.
The Journey from Self-Conscious to Aware
The other evening I taught a lesson at the Loft that was meant to help beginning memoirists distinguish between the character and the narrator in their stories. We create personas for ourselves on the page; the main character in every memoir is the younger self who experiences and is changed by events; we can also …
Dismissing, Then Welcoming the Audience
You must sympathize with the reader’s plight (most readers are in trouble about half the time) but never seek to know the reader’s wants. Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. When I came upon these words in Strunk …
Reflective Writing
The best literature revolves around a central core of an idea or emotion—what I like to call the heartbeat. The heartbeat pumps life into every artery and vein of a story. It unifies. It doesn’t prevent the inclusion of other themes and motifs, but it does rise to prominence. This heartbeat almost never reveals itself …
Triage
I’m a great proponent of the triage method of revising: Take care of the big problems first and gradually work your way down to the details of language. This is a great policy—in the abstract. If there’s such a thing as a time-saver, prioritizing is it. And generally writers DO pay more attention to word …
Language that Shows
When tweaking language during the final stages of revision, strive for clarity first. Language is meant to communicate. Sound, rhythm, pacing, word choice, sentence structure, punctuation, paragraphing—all stylistic choices—should convey the content rather than call attention to themselves. Take Strunk and White’s advice: “The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is an expression …
Language 2: The Right Word
Great premium is placed on language in our literary culture today. Is it fresh? Is it witty? Does it dazzle? The question I wish reviewers and publishers would ask about language is “Is it true?” We need writers who name the vast diversities of our reality with language that illuminates rather than obscures. Truth, of …
Language 1: Triage
I’m a great proponent of the triage method of revising: Take care of the big problems first and gradually work your way down to the details of language. In the abstract, this is a great philosophy. If there’s such a thing as a time-saver, prioritizing like this is it. And generally writers DO pay more …