In a funny coincidence, I spoke last month at the HippoCamp Creative Nonfiction conference, and both another speaker and myself accidentally quoted the exact same passage from the exact same book.
Who was this popular author? Toni Morrison? Trevor Noah? Nora Roberts?
Nope. Verlyn Klinkenborg:
Know what each sentence says,
What it doesn’t say,
And what it implies.
Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says. Continue reading “The Spotlight”
Recently, a scourge that occasionally plagues the writing community is flaring up again. It’s seductive, and infectious, and once it worms its way into a writer’s prose, it lames it, leaving it to lurch around on the page. For awhile, we thought it eradicated. But a few poorly researched articles popped up online, which got picked up by some seriously misguided souls, and together, they’re sowing confusion. Now, an outbreak of epidemic proportions looms.
The scourge’s name? “Said is Dead.”
Never heard of it? Good. Clearly you’re making solid life choices. Continue reading “Tagging Dialogue”
Lately I’ve been trying to wrap up a story—without success—and every time I take another run at it, I think of something I read recently about endings, that good ones “shine a point of light on the writer’s best attempt at truth.”
I love that, because it’s how I envision endings. You direct a shiny, narrow beam of light, or aim a long, sturdy arrow, at a pinpoint of a target. Summations, surprise twists, sudden epiphanies—these are not arrows or beams of light. Their scopes are too wide. Continue reading “On Endings”