“I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.” ~ Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye This is our annual update on each other’s summer. Send a photo or two and let us know what you’ve been up to! SUSAN C/SII From Susan C in SII and living in CT: In between writing, painting, Library meetings, short trips and volunteering, I work on my 1500-piece never ending jigsaw puzzle of Van Gogh’s Starry...
When a Memoir is for the Writer and Not the Reader I wrote the book quickly and without—oh dear, I hate to admit this—too much thought. I barely revised. I knew everything about the story before I even started. Novels are agony. Life is agony, but for me writing the memoir was not. ~ E. McCracken Elizabeth McCracken who studied in Iowa, is a fellow of this and a nominee of that, and yes, a remarkably talented wordsmith. See for yourself. She’s also witty and wry in the classic tradition...
Writing Workshop: The Attack Sentence, Plot, and the Underlying Message of an Epic A love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America. Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly...
Studio Writers Share Process “For dramatic impact we must be grounded in place and experience the illusion of real-time passing, which only occurs in scenes. We must live the moment along with the characters, especially in moments of change…While summaries supply the connective tissue, scenes are the blood and breath of fiction, narrative essays, and memoir.” From Showing vs. Telling by Laurie Alberts It went on for sixteen weeks. This teaching on scene. I was studying with Tom Spanbauer in...
How can a student of creative writing search for and find plot in a book? This excellent novel, one of the best I have enjoyed since Shipping News by Annie Proulx and Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, was recommended for study this year by Jean in SIII. Jean is a historical novelist in the thick of research and writing her novel from the time of the revolutionary war, and she has an innate sense of good writing! At first, I was hesitant to read a book titled “A novel of the...
