I believe in ghosts, though not necessarily the kind that floats through the air. I believe in the ghosts that live in our minds: personal ghosts, historical ghosts, ghosts of all possible persuasions. I believe that every person’s life story contains within it a series of hauntings. Sometimes it can […]
What’s So Mysterious about Suspense?
Way, way back in the day, when I was coming up as a young writer, there was a good deal of serious chatter about why plot and characterization were the horseless carriage and icebox of literature (they were done, finished, just like tonality and melody in classical music). Characters in […]
That Opening Paragraph
Ever wonder why you can find your way to a distant location in town, even if you know only a few, if any, of the names of the streets on the way? Erik Jonsson, in his book Inner Navigation: Why We Get Lost and How We Find Our Way, claims […]
Writing that Travels
“To see is to have seen,” said the great 20th-century Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa. This seemingly simple sentence can be read more than one way. First, as a critique: we see mainly what we have already seen, that sight is a well-worn habit. Another interpretation suggests the opposite: that at […]
Imaginary Social Worlds
In December of 1980, Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon, believing that he had some fashion of personal relationship with his victim. A few months later, in March of 1981, John Hinckely attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, in hopes of impressing his fantasy crush, Jodi Foster. Why would these […]
The Way Narratives Go
Recently, one of my students confessed to the class that in a long-ago creative writing workshop, she had once been humiliated when her instructor had chalked on the board the structure of her short story, which was found inadequate beside a comparative chalked version of the Freytag Triangle. For those […]
Countless Lives Inhabit Us
In two recent posts, “What’s Structure Got to Do With It?” and “The Life We Learn to Lead as Writers,” I took a look at the various ins and outs of how writers structure their work. In this post, I’d like to consider the idea of anti-structure, or at least […]
The Life We Learn to Lead as Writers
After my last post, on the units of structure Shakespeare employed in his plays, scenes arranged as diptychs and triptychs, I thought I’d continue my thoughts on structure in writing by quoting a prose poem by the poet David Ignatow, titled “The Life They Lead”: I wonder whether two trees […]
What’s Structure Got to Do with It?
More years ago than I like to count, when I was but a first-year graduate student in creative writing, I came upon a slim volume in a bookstore titled Shakespearean Design, by Mark Rose. I pulled it off the shelf and gave it a glance, because I was taking a […]
Yet Another Chapter One
One of my favorite novels in recent years is I, the Divine (A Novel in First Chapters), by the Lebanese-American writer Rabih Alameddine. It’s a brilliant novel in the form of a memoir, written by one Sarah Nour El-Din, and it’s an evolving memoir at that, which is where the […]