I didn’t write On Brassard’s Farm as social commentary – it’s a story that celebrates Vermont small farms and wild lands, romantic love, community, and just being alive. True, it’s set on a struggling dairy farm, and I depicted the hardships and uncertainties of that life. But as I...
I’m still just beginning to catch up with the “authoring” trade. I put the word in ironic, or dubious, quotes because my old friend Bill Lederer (author of The Ugly American and many other famous books) said — this was while I was still a guitarist and had never...
I have been derelict in keeping up with this blog about writing technique and process. My sole, poor excuse is that I’ve been too busy writing. With my new book about to be published, though, I am reminded every day of certain rituals associated with being a writer. Each...
This my second post about James Alan McPherson, a man whose example provided the most important writing advice I’ve ever received. When we conversed over breakfast, the concern that most consumed him was his acrimonious divorce and the fact that he wasn’t allowed to see his children. This filled...
Only part of this post concerns writing technique; mostly, it focuses on my mentor and friend, James Alan McPherson, who died this summer. However, that single consideration is an enormously important perspective on process, one that can guide any writer. Jim was one of my first workshop teachers at...
This is my third post concerning techniques for beginning stories and (primarily) novels. As I mentioned in the first two, beginnings can be generally divided into two approaches: distant and close. This post will consider “closer” beginnings. While distant beginnings start by providing the reader with visual, factual, or...
Distant Beginnings In my last post, I suggested some basic concepts that can guide a writer into beginning a story or novel — most importantly, John Gardener’s idea of “the contract” forged between writer and reader in the first paragraph. I then suggested that beginnings functionally distill into two...
Writing Technique: Beginnings Because I’m a novelist, writing teacher at Champlain College, and technical writing and screenplay consultant gun-for-hire, people often approach me for advice on writing. As far as novels go, I usually answer that I haven’t a clue how to write them. I’ve published six — including...
This is a quick follow-up on the six-foot-tall kite featured in the prior post. Several readers wanted to see the kite itself, but we didn’t take any photos of (as opposed to from) it. Today, however, I discovered that my son Liam had taken a 10-second video of it on his...
This is the fifth post in my creativity series and the last devoted to Dr. Stuart Brown’s ideas on the subject of play. This week, it’s a personal tale of play, with a video to illustrate it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te0kfivkFVY Like too many people my age, I forget to play. Certainly,...