Author Archive
I say good writer because, let us be clear at the outset, that is finally the fundamental factor in having a successful book or books: on some level, the book must be reasonably well-done. It is important that we never forget that. Yet there are plenty of good books out there — written by excellent […]
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This was written by the late Ted Hughes, most famous, I think, for being the husband of Sylvia Plath: The pig lay on a barrow dead. It weighed, they said, as much as three men. Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes. Its trotters stuck straight out. Such weight and thick pink bulk Set in death […]
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In May of 1606, the first 104 settlers arrived in Jamestown. What those settlers found when they came to the “Virginia Tidewater Region” (so named in honor of the Virgin Queen, Queen Elizabeth) was a land of spectacular beauty and inexhaustible abundance: oceans teeming with seafood, woodlands swarming with birds and wild game, soil so […]
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Who won the election? The Government won. In this case, it was the left-wing government. Here is a small sampling of the things that Barack Obama supporters backed — please own it — in backing Barack Obama: Barack Obama recently welcomed the election of the first Islamist president in Egypt’s history. This is a man […]
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In hell, said Randal Jarell, Americans tell each other how to make a martini. A martini — “the elixir of quietude” as E.B. White described it — consists of gin and vermouth. The ingredients are chilled and then strained into a cocktail glass. That, at any rate, is the original martini, though vodka is now, […]
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The situation is the nucleus of your story: it contains the kernel of your conflict from which the rest of your storyline will grow — and a real storyline cannot exist without some sort of conflict. But what exactly is conflict? In writing circles, you hear the word incessantly, and yet you almost never hear […]
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“Rat-eyed” Virginia Woolf described Somerset Maugham as. “No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word,” said Eudora Welty of William Faulkner. “Curiously dull, furiously commonplace, and often meaningless,” Alfred Kazin said of William Faulkner. “Hemingway never climbed out on a limb and never used a word where the reader […]
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He was the only child of middle-aged parents, a miner-turned-truck-driver named Neil and Neil’s wife Angela, a half Cherokee lady of rare beauty whom Joel loved with all his heart. He grew up silent, a silent child, pale and skinny but healthy. He brought coal from the shed to the stoker. He took out clinkers. […]
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If plot is the skeleton upon which the meat of your story hangs, then characters are surely the heart and soul. Characterization is the art of presenting the people who populate your story. Characterization is, in essence, nothing more — or less — than the depiction of motive (a word, incidentally, that comes from the […]
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“Do not start a story with the protagonist waking up,” says Joe Konrath. But with him here — as with so many other things — I must demur. Konrath’s peevish list of proscriptions came to my attention recently via Radical Roz Morris, who wrote about another preposterous notion Mr. Konrath (along with many others) has: […]
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“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” wrote George Orwell, “and when there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” I confess I myself sometimes feel like that cuttlefish spurting out ink, but […]
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In 1948, after divorcing his second wife Gwyn, John Steinbeck fell into a funk during which he was able to write almost nothing, except a series of exceptional letters to his editor Pascal (“Pat”) Covici. Here’s a small sampling which I hope you find as life-affirming as I do: September 19, 1948 Dear Pat: You […]
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Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) wrote eighty-five novels in twenty years and made innumerable corrections and revisions in the proof sheets of each. This opus he called La Comedie Humaine — or The Human Comedy. Concerning his countless revisions, his first publisher — one Henri Latouche — said to Balzac, none too politely: “What the devil […]
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The cat eats the praying mantis By punching it to death, Pushing it with her paws, Playing soccer with it, Tossing it in the air, Carrying it around in her jaws And finally, when the insect Has no more motion or flutter, Chewing its green head off. — Karl Shapiro
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011