I sit at a dinner table on the back patio of a French restaurant. It is a warm October night. The waiter has brought wine, a California Zinfandel, and subjected us to a short spiel—the soup of the day is a ginger carrot puree. It seems that everyone, six of us, loosely connected through friends […]
I lay in my daughter’s bed, where I’ve slept, for a long time awake with my eyes closed, thinking of all the essays I would rather write. I have drafts I want to work on, about birds and sharks and theme parks. I would rather write about foot fungus than write earnestly about marriage. I […]
I try to write about rage, and old muck gets in the way. I’m obsessed with injuries past, dormant for a while, that are suddenly screaming for attention. I can’t get a damn thing done. I assume there’s a reason why they’re clamoring, so I may as well start digging. Our oven blew up about a […]
In fourth grade, my best friend Kimberly walked me—or rather, dragged me, my hunched body straggling two steps behind her—to Chamber Singer auditions. I’d started singing at six years old, and I idolized the girls and boys who traveled to Nashville and Atlanta and performed outside the Publix grocery store on Old Cutler. Our elementary […]
We write in order to be read. We compose our thoughts, create our scenarios, spin our tales to reach and touch our audience and to be understood. And when we do, we hope our writing has what Hollywood calls “legs.” Something that endures over time, that will keep on going, keep on running. In order […]
“Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.” – Sigmund Freud I find myself drawn to the writing of poets-turned-novelists, or poets-turned-memoirists. Michael Ondaatje, long before he wrote The English Patient or any of his other novels, was a poet, as one might glean from his prose. Who but a poet […]
I stopped going to the dentist around the time I started needing gynecological exams. It was on the waning end of adolescence that first I felt an OB crank me open with a speculum for a look-see. I have a general aversion to exposure; I was, and still am, wary of being peered into. Tender […]
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. — Gustave Flaubert For the past few months, I’ve been investigating what it means to “slow down” in order to support and deepen a viable creative practice. I’ve looked at adjusting rhythms of transport and control, […]
I’m in therapy for an abusive relationship, but I spend most of my weekly fifty-minutes cracking jokes for my psychologist. A few weeks ago she pointed out that I laugh whenever I reveal something that hurt me. “When your boyfriend shoved you, how did you feel?” she asked. “One time I kneed him in the […]
I recently taught a month-long intensive workshop called “Write Your Screenplay in Four Weeks” at St. John’s College in Santa Fe. I’m always struck by how much I learn about writing as I share my own process and watch others develop their own. All my collected rules of writing come into play not only when […]
The trope of the writer in a dusty room with his fingers teetering over the keys of a typewriter is well worn. A cigarette dangles from his lips. A pot of coffee smolders in the corner. Magazines and sheaves of paper scatter the floor. Perhaps a cat lounges on the sofa, or watches pigeons on […]
When I need a book, I call my mother first. She volunteers at a library bookstore and sometimes you can get what you need there for fifty cents. My creative nonfiction mentor wanted me to read Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, so over a salad lunch together I asked my mom if she’d seen any […]
A few nights ago, I was on my way from Denver to Creede, Colorado. I arranged to sleep in a little red Coleman tent on the grounds of a farm just outside Salida, about midway between. I found it on Airbnb. It cost thirty-four dollars. The rain graciously waited to start until I zipped up […]
“All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” -Pablo Picasso On the first day of a weeklong creative writing camp, Joshua, Dylan, and Darcy settled into their seats on the couches. Through introductions I learned that, while Joshua was nine like everyone else, he had skipped to […]
Dialogue is an important ingredient to any good story. When characters begin to talk, they not only come to life for the reader, they become real for the writer as well. Writing good dialogue is essential to drawing a reader into the character world you’re creating, whether it is in fiction, nonfiction, or screenplays. Characters […]
When I was eight years old, my father brought home a rabbit. He and my uncle had been foraging for mushrooms when they found it cowering under a pine tree. Its leg was broken and it was unable to move quickly but it was otherwise a large, healthy rabbit. Its fur was thick and gray, […]
When I was pregnant with my first daughter, my social media photostream underwent the (irritating, irrepressible) transition from Normal Adult Feed to Prenatal and, then, Child-Rearing Feed. There was a lot going on. Life in my postpartum body treated me to some surprises and some alarming changes. I couldn’t do Zumba without peeing my pants […]
During a two-hour question-and-answer session at our June residency, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo told the Antioch MFA community, “Commerce is fast, art is slow.” I took that to mean, if you want to make something that didn’t exist before—something layered and meaningful, something unexpected—you have to take it slow. That’s a challenge for me. […]
I met Wryly last June, when they were known as Wendy. This would change within a couple months. One December night, we walked along Venice Beach during Antioch University’s MFA winter residency. As long as I’d known them, Wryly had gone by they/them pronouns, but it wasn’t until December, perhaps ushered by the name change, […]
A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper. E.B. White One of the greatest challenges of the writing process is not the writing itself, but the inception, the starting, the beginning of writing: sitting in a chair on a new day to write a […]
You might be a writer if all of your books are at the bottom of your bag because you packed them first. You might be a writer if you see landscapes in descriptions. The cumulus clouds drifted high above us; the water lapped its wet tongue at our toes. You might be a writer if […]
When my brother was little, his bedroom was a minefield of broken things. He took stuff apart, wanted to see how it worked. Toy cars, radios. He was just as happy with hand-me-down junk from our grandparents’ basement as he was with something new from the store. It all had the same dismantling fate. Beware, […]
There was much debate around the PEN American Center’s decision to honor the satirical cartoon newsmagazine Charlie Hebdo with the Freedom of Expression Courage Award at its literary gala earlier this month in New York City. Critically-acclaimed writers who were scheduled as hosts declined to attend. A little over two hundred well-esteemed writers and poets […]
To the right of my house, hidden past four raised beds of squash, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and cucumbers, further past two wild patches of mint, there is an old secret garden. There, morning glory grows wild, climbing our two-story house, twining into our rain gutters, pulling them down, and covering our wooden fence. There, also, […]
Lately, I have had a gnawing feeling. It is in my throat and sometimes it moves to my stomach. It seems to start as soon as I think about what I have to do. It really begins to pulse when I think about what I haven’t done. I am suffering from…procrastination: the scourge of writers, […]
Let’s talk. About dialogue. About speech. About sentences. As a screenwriter, dialogue is one of the mainstays of my craft. In fact, it’s one of the only two tools I am allowed to use to bring a story to life: dialogue and action. It’s like writing with one arm tied behind my back. Sentences are […]
I recently gathered with a small group of friends to watch a documentary that was made two years ago about our friend Renee in her final months of life. Nine chairs were arranged in a half-circle to transform the Santa Monica office lobby where we met into a theater. On the lobby’s granite welcome desk […]
In the digital age, there is an incessant drive to “share” what you’re thinking, doing, eating, writing, not writing, obsessing about. This starts to feel like a bright and shiny red alarm button, urging me to cast my words out into the world: comment on social media posts or online articles, rant about a television […]
Over the past few weeks, my husband and I have set about clearing, prepping, and planting our garden for the main summer season. Though we live in a climate that boasts year-round growing, summer feeds us color—it is the season we eat rainbows, stuffing our mouths with sun-warmed fruits, painting our bellies, while outside the […]
I just submitted the workshop packet for my third MFA residency this June. In a delayed, it’s-too-late-to-change-it discovery, I realized that I have basically written the exact same thing for the third submission in a row. Not only that, I submitted it with errors: a typo, an incorrect verb tense shift, a missing coma. The […]
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