In his insightful essay, Found in Translation from last Sunday’s New York Times, author Michael Cunningham peels the many-layered onion of the authorial relationship. His initial premise is translation, which one immediately assumes means language to language. And it does. Every book is re-formed into…
I’m constantly captured by other writers’ stories – of course, their literary masterworks, but in this case I’m talking about their personal stories: how they struggled, how they anguished, how they sweated, persisted and survived (or sometimes not) until they managed to squeeze out something…
I foolishly started reading Anna Karenina this spring – twice, and then again this summer. Each time I was dissuaded by the time-swallowing responsibility of editing other people’s work. Beloved writer-friends and clients, you know I adore you. But every once in a while it…
OK, this is a quick one, but it’s a lot of fun. An article today in the L.A. Times features a website called “I Write Like” where you can pop in a few paragraphs of text and discover which famous writer your style most resembles.…
I’m lucky because my boys, ages 6 and 9, still let me read to them each night before bed. They’ve graduated from children’s picture books to novels that develop psyches – Narnia, Harry Potter, the wild, wondrous world of Roald Dahl. Recently I convinced them…
We all hope and pray that the writing we’ve been slaving away at for weeks, months or years is brilliant, publishable, praiseworthy. Sometimes we’re right. More often than not, it seems, we’re wrong. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re bad writers. I found two links…
It’s a well-known fact that writers rarely make a lot of money at their work. OK, there are exceptions, but most of us can barely afford to buy a blouse with our royalties, never mind J.K. Rowling and her impressive Scottish mansion. Most of us…
These past few weeks have been busy ones for me with several friends launching and promoting their latest works. First came Marc Aronson’s If Stones Could Speak. Then the joyous hullabaloo shared by all The Writers Circle over Stuart Lutz’s The Last Leaf. You all…
I am not a poet. I would never claim to be. If writing were music, I prefer to play conductor to soloist. My fiction would be a symphony, not a piece for solo piano. But the craft of a prose writer also involves cadences, subtle…
Many of us come to a weekly writing workshop, a writers group or an MFA program looking for rules, instructions, some correct route to take as we navigate our way through our work. Let me tell you after years with my own writing and helping…
Perhaps it was a mistake to read James Patterson Inc. back to back with Michael Cunningham’s A Writer Should Always Feel Like He’s In Over His Head. For James Patterson, writing doesn’t seem very hard. Of course, I wouldn’t dare disparage him. Honestly, I’m impressed.…
So often I dwell on the unavoidable truth that writing is hard. Every day as I face the blank or unrevised page, I feel the dread that I won’t be able to fill or fix it, that somehow the difficult work is simply beyond me.…
