Category: Writing Life

A lengthy if not especially scientific survey of my Facebook friends today found that most of them who posted about 9/11 focused on their location during the tragedy. They told their perspective on the situation always through the lens of space: I was at the doctor’s office when … I was in class when … I was […]

Granta’s latest theme is “Medicine.” Who better to write about medicine than a practicing pediatrician and a man named to the New Yorker “20 under 40” list? Chris Adrian kicks off the latest issue with “Grand Rounds,” a story unlike his other fiction. It’s a transcript of a speech given to other doctors, so it’s […]

Many writers have a longstanding embargo against adverbs. Too often this is analogous to the U.S./Cuba embargo: originally made for some worthwhile purpose, but as the years pass, that purpose seems less and less meaningful and more and more antiquated. Mark Twain called the overabundance of adverbs an “adverb plague”: “I am dead to adverbs; they […]

I’ve been reading “The Stories of J.F. Powers” on the recommendation of Charles Baxter, who mentioned Powers in his excellent collection of essays on writing, “The Art of Subtext.” Baxter situates Powers as an alternative to Flannery O’Connor, saying that he hates O’Connor because her imagination is “nourished by cruelty,” she uses her characters for […]

A woman just used Google autocomplete to characterize every state in the nation. The results are funny. The first one for Illinois is “Why is Illinois so … corrupt?” According to autocomplete, Oregon is weird, rainy and liberal. Georgia is hot, racist and boring. So I decided to do the same for literature: Why is […]

An excerpt from a work in progress: “Any interaction with a book is a type of intercourse: a ménage a trois between reader, writer, and work. The way literary theorists interact with a text is sadistic. They take pleasure in the pain of the text and, judging by the contortions of the prose, the pain […]

Charles Baxter takes down John Irving in the New York Review of Books: But the pitfalls of a novel constructed largely through plot are also on display: the characters and their construction here are schematic, as if written to and for a thesis that requires them to be dropped into slots. We are repeatedly clobbered by […]

A meditation on grief, writing colonies, and summer blockbusters: Yaddo itself was born from grief, that great leveler. The colony became a playground for creative minds because Katrina Trask, the matriarch of the mansion and its well-maintained grounds, lost all of her children in infancy or childhood and she needed something to do with her […]

Where are you when you speak to your audience? Harold Brodkey says each author has a particular location from where he speaks to his audience — fireplace, bar, outdoors, drawing room. “A kind of writing solely meant for a public forum is often less interesting than writing where the writer has invented the public space […]