writing literary ficton

…there’s a cat in Lynne’s next book, MOTHERS OF FATE! She wants you to know, she did her level best to get rid of it, but she’s failed. It’s dead in her house (see photo proof) but alive and well in the novel. She assures you, though, the (dull) gray cat has only a bit […]

In case you’re one of the few people who’ve managed to miss my news, THE TESTAMENT OF HAROLD’S WIFE is coming out September 25 from Kensington Books. I thought you might enjoy the real-life stories that gave life to this novel. There were two completely different experiences that planted the seeds. The first had to […]

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 […]

The sky and air felt charged this week when I walked Hannah and Maggie, the chocolate Labs. The moon was already up while the sun hung low and cool in a fading denim sky. Too early for twilight! The scent of crushed leaves was strong as the dogs hunted in the dry amber mounds out on the trail. […]

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 think everyone is due an update on my friend Diana’s urban chickens, aka the world’s easiest research. My blog post of May 13 introduced the chicks (Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy) when Diana was beginning to wonder if Amy might be, oops, really an Amos. Recall that hens are perfectly welcome within city limits. […]

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, […]

Given my love for the natural world, I hit the jackpot when my dear friend Diana lost her mind and brought home four baby chicks in early April. I immediately recognized that I’ll gleefully use chicken-raising in a novel (definitely in an urban setting, too; Diana and her husband live within the city limits and […]

One thing I’ve learned is that most of us are passionate about a couple of things and how much those interests emerge as defining parts of our identities. I don’t know exactly when I fell in love with being able to identify, for example, the wildflowers that right now have turned the forest floor into […]

Would you think for a moment about your favorite novels? What about them do you remember most? My memories are of tense or revelatory scenes that came alive as strongly as if a staged play were in front of me. (For our purpose, let’s define a scene as a a unit of enacted drama that takes place […]

“To a poet nothing can be lost.” Samuel Johnson Something happened a few days ago that got me thinking about depicting emotion when I write, and how often I find my way to it through metaphor. Winter had reasserted itself, so Hannah’s forest hike was on icy sloggy mud that sucked at boots and […]

On Sunday it was fifty-four degrees, the air edgeless, soft and pale yellow. A young fisherman in a navy sweatshirt and baseball cap was on the edge of the river where Hannah swims; he took his simple hook and line upstream a bit when Hannah leapt from the bank to retrieve a stick my husband […]

To those readers in winter-affected areas: is the weather making everything feel like extra work to you? It is to me. Just getting dressed is a shivering labor involving long underwear under my jeans, a fleece over my shirt, wool socks as thick as my thumb. Preparing to actually leave the house, say to walk Hannah? […]

Have I been out to start the primary research of hunting caches yet? Okay, I’m a wimp. The ground is snow-covered, temperatures frigid. Yes, my chocolate Lab, Hannah, gets a daily hike in the woods. But geocaching involves moving more slowly than she and I do, backtracking, stopping to check waypoints on the GPS, and presently […]

I’m going to try to make a case that Dr. Mark Fischer of the College of Mt. St. Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio, is normal, and it’s going to be hard. Working against me is the fact that he’s a brilliant professor of physics. Also a researcher, he teams with eminent colleagues like chemist Dr. Diana […]

I do promise that I’ll quit following that SUV after today! (It’s described in the Jan. 1st post if you’re a new reader.) If you don’t mind, let’s revisit it one more time to talk about another especially important component of fiction. Point of view. An author first addresses point(s) of view as s/he decides who will tell the story. For […]

Let’s go back to the slushy dark afternoon of my first post. Remember how I played sleuth and trailed the SUV? Already the painting on the back window had generated the makings of a plot. But a bit of tailgating yielded extra details: the birth date was Dec. 31, 2001, and the date of death […]

“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 […]