The Writing Process
Why I choose to write in McDonald’s
Two old, Italian guys are sitting in a booth beside me at McDonald’s. FIRST GUY: Leo, where were you? I thought you were going to take me to Avon today. SECOND GUY: I was. But then I got into my car and fell asleep. FIRST GUY (with complete sincerity): God. Damn. I hate when that happens. This is…
Read MoreTeachers of writing at any level: Read this immediately. Nothing is more important.
The 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Patrick Modiano, who had this to say about the writing process during his acceptance speech: Writing is a strange and solitary activity. It is a little like driving a car at night, in winter, on ice, with zero visibility. You have no choice, you cannot go…
Read MoreStoryteller Interruptus
I don’t have an office. I have a sad, little room attached to the side of the house with ancient windows and no heat that would require a hat and mittens in order to spend any time in. So when I am working at home, I do the majority of my writing at the dining…
Read MoreThe best way to stop a novelist dead in his tracks
Want to know what will stop a novelist from finishing the final tweaks of his manuscript? His five year-old daughter teaching his two year-old son how to tell bad knock knock jokes. It’s the worst.
Read MoreMy son doesn’t give a damn about my deadlines.
It was early in the morning. I was trying to finish a book. I needed some peace and quiet. I got this instead. And it was great.
Read MoreHemingway was an idiot. Write sober.
It sounds clever, and the association between writing and the consumption of alcohol is a powerful and lasting one, but I disagree with Hemingway on this one. Frankly, I think he was an idiot when it came to this idea. How about we all just write and edit sober and do our best work instead?
Read MoreJohn Steinbeck was an unrealistically and obscenely mature man
I have never used an em dash. I don’t even know how to make an em dash. But you can still find them in my books.
Noreen Malone of Slate argues against the em dash. The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing. It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence. Don’t you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won’t be hurt—when a writer…
Read More“Where do you get your ideas?” is an understandable but impossible-to-answer question for authors. But “Nuns at Scout camp” will be one of my answers someday.
I’m often asked where I get my ideas for books, which is an understandable but impossible question to answer. There is no well of ideas. There is no secret formula. There is no one answer to that question, as much as fledgling writers seem to want there to be. Simply put, I hear something. I…
Read MoreDungeons & Dragons brought me back to writing and saved my career.
The New York Times reports that Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Diaz is a former Dungeons & Dragons player. So too was Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire. Many more. The league of ex-gamer writers also includes the “weird fiction” author China Miéville (“The City & the City”); Brent Hartinger (author of “Geography…
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