Here’s the scene that comes to me: Hannah, fairly new in her midwifery apprenticeship, making a mess of her first attempt to draw blood. She’s hesitant to poke the needle deep enough to catch a vein, so blood spurts everywhere and the man who has offered his arm is hurt, albeit not much. Hannah develops a full-fledged terror of drawing blood. She’s sure that by inserting herself into others’ lives, she’ll hurt them.
Recently I attended a secular conversation at which the word “Source” was batted around the way religious folks use the word “God.” I find “Source” a helpful term, although perhaps not big enough to encompass my sense of divine presence. But it got me thinking: What’s a writer’s source? What grounds us and inspires us?
Silence: A Writer’s Source Read More »
I can’t tell you how often I read early drafts of memoirs that are thorough, lively recordings of events, great for preserving family history but absolutely unsatisfying as memoirs. First this happened, and then this, and then this… Even when the events are shocking, amazing, horrific, terrifying, or otherwise scintillating, the drafts read like flat
Giving Your Story a Plot Read More »
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
The Journey from Self-Conscious to Aware Read More »
Perhaps the most important question for every creative writer to ask—and definitely the hardest question to answer—is “What’s at stake for me?” For writing to work well, the writer must care deeply. On the surface this question seems simplistic; our care is instinctive, compelling, and unspoken. In practice, the journey through revision is an excavation
Whenever I get swept up in the competitive, audience-seeking dimension of the writing life, I turn to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet as an antidote. Rilke returns me to my essential, life-giving reasons for writing. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it
From Rilke, With Love Read More »
During a moment of discouragement this morning—others writers have better focus than me, more time to read great literature, no three-year-old pulling love and attention away from the page—I flashed back to college, to what I now realize is a seminal moment in my development as a writer. The world looked bleak (Was it my
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
The more I revise and the more I help new writers learn to revise, the more I’m convinced that good revision, like any good writing, is essentially play. Robin Marantz Henig’s recent article in the New York Times , “Taking Play Seriously,” looks at recent scientific studies that ask, What is play’s role in
Playing with Revision Read More »
I’m a tender-hearted gardener. When last year’s cherry tomatoes reseed themselves, I don’t have the heart to pull them out. And so I end up with an abundance of late-ripening cherry tomatoes. What to do? Make tomato sauce. But cherry tomatoes are a hassle to peal, even after blanching, so I choose the lazy route,