Not Pretty in Paris
On a gray morning in Paris, I pushed back the heavy velvet curtains in my hotel room. There, just across the street, almost close enough to touch, was Charles Garnier’s extravagant opera house — the...
View ArticleLet’s Talk About Specs
At a time when the average person would sooner donate money to a relief fund for investment bankers than pay full retail price for a CD, millions of Americans happily spend hundreds of dollars on a...
View ArticleOn Style…
Almost the first thing a reader notices about a piece of writing is its style — unless the style is transparent. Transparent prose is prose that lets you see the object before you. It has often been...
View Article…And How To Get It
And now, to examine an entirely different style, consider this line from Ben Marcus’s experimental and lovely first novel, The Age of Wire and String, published in 1995. The author’s postmodern premise...
View ArticleEverybody Wants More than Just One Thing
It is standard advice to state that the main character or characters should want something. That it is wanting — desire — that motivates characters to act and action that creates the story, novel,...
View ArticleDesire is Complicated
The truth is, almost all of us want more than just one thing. The child who wants water also wants to share it with his mother. The mother wants her child to have water and also food. Take a look at...
View ArticleWhatever Happens, Happens Somewhere
In her essay “Place in Fiction,” Eudora Welty wrote that “place is one of the lesser angels.” She said other considerations were more important than place — “character, plot, symbolic meaning … and...
View ArticleA Gun in the First Act
Every place has a rhythm. You must echo that rhythm in your writing. A character in New York City will not be as mellow as a character on the beach. A character in Wyoming will have a more expansive...
View ArticleMy Father Through Mann’s Eyes
I can’t ask my father if he has seen Anthony Mann’s Man of the West because my father is dead. A mild aficionado of the “western,” he might have come upon it, maybe on some meandering 70s’ or 80s’...
View ArticleNo Way to Bresson
At 18 I began to teach myself about sex by watching foreign films. And when I write “sex,” I am at the same time inscribing the word “women.” I was introduced to many intellectual types across the...
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