Readers need to connect the content to their own lives. Recently I was reading Jane Eyre. The narrator and main character Jane was describing a view of Rochester seated alone in a darkened room, and suddenly I was transported back about ten years and the memory of walking into my father’s office to see him…
My previous post on William H. Patterson, Jr.’s, Heinlein biography focused on what I learned about the writing business. But that wasn’t all I gained from the reading. In many ways, Heinlein’s life provided general rules to live by as a writer and a person. Take care of your mortality: physical health, mental health, diet…
I have been a fan of Heinlein’s for more than forty years. When he was alive, I watched constantly for his next publication, and I have read nearly everything he has written and a great deal of what has been written about his work. Learning only recently that there was an official biography about him…
foundations for a writing office I’ve been tweeting about the lovely little getaway house my husband and I have been building for the last three months. I am pleased it’s coming along, but what I really care about and am excited about is my office. Sure the house is going to have bedrooms, a living…
Time links past with present Harper Lee had quite a task creating the narrative voice of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Sure Scout was a six-year-old girl who ages about two years in the course of the book; what’s the challenge? Seems easy enough — in that short span of years there is not…
building character from within The variety of ways one can convey a character’s viewpoint are many and challenging. Dialogue, other character’s viewpoint, narrator, info dump and internal thought as a type of dialogue and first person speaker and then imbedded thinking stuck right inside the narration. I find such character reveals, when done well, a…
John Steinbeck wrote for and about the guy next door, the man that works to pay the bills at the end of the month, for the poor cuss who hopes and hopes even when hope is lost, and loses and loses, even when he wins. Tortilla Flat He moved slowly and cautiously. Now and…
Door to the inside of a monster John Gardner’s Grendel is a work of delight and derangement cluttered in one diabolical monster’s mind. It is poetry garbed in prose, sophistry hiding behind a misunderstood, disadvantaged descendent of Cain. Gardner slips his monster into the reader, building sympathy and support as the beast twists its words…
