historical fiction for a modern reader
This is the view of the sky from my desk. A. Wall. Of. Snow. And this is pretty much the story of this winter in Vermont. One massive snow storm after another. Which has a lot of people complaining and I can’t blame anyone one bit. Truth is . . . though I don’t say … Read more…
This movie has such an ingenious premise. A story in layers, in which in Part One you learn—slowly—that your main character is unreliable and destroyed. The source of his anguish is his wife, who wrote her thesis with the title of something like The Unreliable Narrator. Her conclusion was how the most unreliable narrator is … Read more…
I came to writing thinking I loved complicated plots. And some little corner of me still does—still dreams of that perfect book with twists and turns at every corner and characters who are perfectly poised to be devastated by them. Except . . . that isn’t ever one book. It’s a series, or a very … Read more…
Back in the day, when I first launched my ridiculous wobbling bicycle ride into being a “real writer,” I viewed “Getting Published” as the shining prize. Back then, when I read about debut writers getting a deal and a lot of attention, I immediately felt the barbs of stinging envy. Pure, raging, unfiltered jealousy—such as … Read more…
My daughter just finished applying to ten colleges—at the expense of ten years of my life. Her deadlines nearly did me in. We have different styles, you see: I tend to tackle things quickly to get them off my list, while she can’t really get started until there’s no room left to procrastinate. She never … Read more…
I’m grateful not to be the sort of writer who suffers from the dastardly “Writer’s Block”—I can always write something, though it may be so lousy I throw it out later or spend many too many hours rewriting it. I suffer instead from a related condition I think of as “Description Block.” It’s not … Read more…
So you think you’re fairly hip, eh? You’ve negotiated college and graduate school and you can read a subway map like you were born with it hardwired into your brain. You know the coolest coffee shops with the most friendly-but-edgy baristas. You have interesting friends who discuss philosophy who come through town and stop in … Read more…
I’ve lived all over the United States, on both coasts and in the South and the Upper Midwest. I’ve lived in large cities and their suburbs, in a small city for eight years and now, for the past seventeen years, in a small town of 3000 people. At the age of thirty-three, after all this … Read more…
Imagine you’re a girl in junior high school. You were born in a small town, to a family of farmers and loggers, in which the only other person who likes to read is your father’s Aunt Edna, who rarely takes her nose out of an indistinguishable series of those little romance novels from the RiteAid. … Read more…
So movies and novels have a lot in common, right? Both tell stories. And some of the best movies come from novels, don’t they? (Though not so much vice versa!) Which means novelists have the upper hand and are the real storytellers. Except for one thing. Screenwriters, the better ones, actually make … Read more…