Essays
Showing 52 Essays
Showing 52 Essays
September 17th, 2011
Our first furnace was an oil stove that sat just outside the kitchen door, crowding the dinner table on one side of the living room. The stove was square, standing waist-high with slots for vents in the top. A stove pipe ran out the back, a sheet-metal tube that ran up the wall behind the stove, and disappeared into a hole near the ceiling, connecting the stove to the brick chimney behind the plaster.
Read Essay →September 17th, 2011
To make a palm tree, you draw two curving lines that meet at a sharp point. That’s the tree trunk. Then, you draw some zigzag lines between the two lines, to suggest the bark of the tree. Then, you draw long curves that branch from the point, and some zigzag lines that hang off those long curves. For the palm fronds.
Read Essay →September 17th, 2011
This fourth essay will describe a distinction of Minimalism called “Submerging the ‘I’.”
Read Essay →September 17th, 2011
This month, let’s take a break from big concepts and look at an ordinary writing technique. A very basic nuts-and-bolts chunk of advice for you to keep in mind. To some writers, just discussing this topic will seem sleazy – the most obvious plot device – but it happens in stories because it happens in life: The one detail or mistake or character flaw you’ve forgotten about… it comes back around to destroy you.
Read Essay →September 17th, 2011
A lot of what happens here, in this workshop, will be us establishing a common language about writing. That way, we’ll be able to communicate about what works in a piece of writing. And about what could work, better.
Read Essay →September 17th, 2011
If you listen to the way people talk, you’ll notice that most of what this lecture series will be about is mimicking that conversational style. Then, using that style to create a more honest-sounding, compelling piece of fiction. Most of oral storytelling seems to be dead, except for stand-up comedians. Only comics seem to practice delivery methods like timing and pacing and repetition. Aspects of rhetoric that made public speakers famous a hundred years ago.
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To start work at the Freightliner Truck plant, I had to bring a sledgehammer I’d never, ever use.
Read Essay →September 17th, 2011
In my dream world, you wouldn’t be reading this on the internet. We would be sitting around a table, only seven or eight of us, and we’d each read our week’s work out loud.
Read Essay →September 17th, 2011
How Do YOU Tell Time? Consider that you always tell stories, you create stories and share them whether or not you call yourself a “writer.” Every moment you’re awake or dreaming – you have what some cultures call your “Monkey Mind” chattering and yammering, trying to make sense of and resolve every sensory detail you encounter. That little voice that has to find a “meaning” in every event. That voice that replays every moment you’ve just lived.
Read Essay →September 17th, 2011
How often do you stand stock-still with another frozen, paralyzed person and hold a conversation? Maybe only during the hottest moment of the hottest argument you’ve ever had. Maybe never. Probably never. Watch yourself. Watch a movie. Look for the specific bits of physical “business” that characters perform as they speak. Look for the tasks that keep their hands busy, and create a distraction from the conversation at hand, thereby adding tension and visual interest to the scene.
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