character development in fiction

I love control. If everyone—including my dog—would only do what I tell them, it would put the fun back in dysfunctional and (my) life would go so much more smoothly. Let’s include objects too, so my computer would stop being a butthead. Ditto my iphone 5s, and Siri, who clearly has a learning problem. Oh, it […]

Corn languishing in one of Brian’s fields.[/caption] I’ve gone back to the farm market every day to get that amazing sweet corn for the magical ten days the farmer will have it. I go in the late afternoon when I need a break from writing. Normally I’d be out hiking with Hannah, but the relentless heat […]

Hannah, my chocolate Lab, a main character in Where The Trail Grows Faint, will be thirteen next month. Our forays into the woods have changed, although she still shows me that she wants to go by following me to the door in the late afternoon when I get up from working to head out for a walk. She waits […]

An unexpected ludicrous moment, a twist into tragedy, a flash of tenderness: surprise by a character is a crucial element of a riveting story. Speaking yesterday at the College of Mount Saint Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio, Marcus Zusak discussed this as well as describing how he wrote multiple drafts of The Book Thief, trying out different narrators as he worked to understand […]

I’ve just finished Townie, the recently published memoir by Andre Dubus III. I found his first two novels, House of Sand and Fog and The Garden of Last Delights, to be brilliant literary fiction and was eager to see what he’d do with nonfiction. Dubus addresses the tumult of his boyhood after his parents’ divorce, […]

“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.” (Henry Miller) We have slogged through the winter solstice. Long fingers of twilight still reach up and take early hold of the afternoon of a sleety, biting day. Gray slush blends the […]