Writing · Thoughts
Essays and reflections on writing, culture, history, community, and the ideas that stay with us.
What I’m suggesting, though, is that hope, the hope that gets us out of bed in the mornings and allows us to face another barrage of overwhelming pain and negativity, that hope has to lie elsewhere. And I think that where it lies is… well, here. Now.
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I’ll confess from the start: I’m lazy. I sometimes think that I wrote nothing but historical fiction for a while because a) I’d studied history and b) the stories were already there, just waiting to be plucked.
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My smartphone rang just as I was getting ready to leave. I didn’t recognize the number, which just noted, unhelpfully, “Montréal.”
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“What the hell does that mean?” I demanded. “It makes you sound like you’re weaving a tapestry or something.”
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There wasn’t anything we could do to make up to the kids for their mother’s absence, and we didn’t try. Claudia’s rage was palpable. Lukas was quieter, more reserved, but he burst into tears about halfway through the dinner his sister had refused to even come downstairs for, swore at Bisou—Lukas never swore, and he adored the cat—and slammed the door to his room.
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Spencer wasn’t thrilled that I didn’t have better—or, in fact any—news for him. “I don’t understand,” he said, leaning back in his chair and looking at me over steepled fingers. “This child gets snatched and killed and there’s nothing that the city police can find out about it?”
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Don’t know how to get started? That’s not all that unusual. Back in the days of typewriters, people complained about the “terror of the blank page,” and we can translate that easily enough into our Word documents, can’t we?
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He ended up just giving me the box. “I don’t want to sort it,” Frédérique said, suddenly cross. “I don’t want to think about him anymore, okay?”
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Some novels are character-driven: the author develops a protagonist and other secondary and tertiary characters, and allows them to guide the storyline. These authors never know in advance how their novel will end, which can be rather … exciting, to say the least.
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Here’s the best writing advice I ever received: Keep the seat of your pants in the seat of your chair.
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The next morning there was a meeting in the mayor’s office. As I said, in general the mountain goes to Mahomet: in this case, the police were reporting in to their boss’ boss. The mayor was, as they say, “taking an interest,” though I didn’t know how many people yet were aware that Philippe Aubert had been Spencer Clark’s godson.
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As you know, we live in a visual world. No matter how much we writers wish that people would pay attention to the words, it’s images that attract. So why not capitalize on that attraction by creating a book trailer?
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So you have a great idea for an article: congratulations! Maybe you’ve written a lot of great articles; and maybe you’ve even had lots of rejections. There could be a very good reason for those rejections (though, to be honest, it may also depend on the editor’s mood, whether the publication has recently done something similar, or the phase of the moon). Here are some hints for submitting an article that might help:
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I went back to city hall, and my life immediately got a lot more complicated.
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Novels give you a lot of latitude. Think about it: you have time to develop characters, describe places, elaborate on plots and subplots, and explore philosophical questions. There’s a lot of luxury there: luxury of time, luxury of space.
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So the police did what the police do, and I went home. Until we could identify the child whose remains were in that room, there wasn’t much that I could do—besides get in the way.
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November is approaching, and with it the annual exercise in torture writing called the National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. This is when otherwise relatively normal people worldwide (in spite of the catchy name, it’s very much an international affair) plunge themselves into the Herculean—some would say absurd—task of writing a novel in a month.
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The phone rang just as I was getting ready to leave the office. Later, I would remember how I’d felt before it rang, how calm I was. They say that people have premonitions when things are going to go drastically, earth-shakingly wrong, but apparently I leave a lot to be desired in that regard. I was completely clueless.
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So I’ve been doing some writing lately for PTownie, an amazing publication for those who live in—or simply love—Provincetown; and over the past week or so I’ve been researching the dune shacks for a piece I’m writing.
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