How Many Times Can (Should) You Tweak Your Work?
Do you edit as you go, or are you more disciplined than I am and step away from it?
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Thoughts
Essays and reflections on writing, culture, history, community, and the ideas that stay with us.
Different Times Call for Different Reading
We have to find ways to stay human, to stay interested, to stay caring. We must continue to nourish our minds and our spirits.
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Can You See the Light?
I’m not a visual artist, but I live among them. And I saw how, historically, this place has attracted painters for over a century and a half. Made it into an art colony. Nurtured talent that exploded all over the world.
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The Power of Dame Emily’s Ten-Minute Rule
It’s such a small thing, but it has made a tremendous difference in both my productivity and also my—okay, I’ll say it, mental health.
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Do You Care? Here’s How
But, importantly, they do not make any of those feelings or situations about you: they create a reality in which you are part of the characters’ lives, emotions, and cares.
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Why Do the Arts Matter?
In ancient Greece, art and music were deemed the only channels to communicate with the gods. I think they were on to something.
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Moving Beyond Disaster-Think
Our new role: conservationists of the paintings and symphonies and books and performances that express humanity’s greatest ideas and emotions, protecting the ones that exist and creating more, no matter what the difficulty, no matter if it breaks our hearts.
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The Morality of Crime Fiction
Moral crime fiction, on the other hand, is steeped in reality. It holds up a mirror to the reader and posits that under the right circumstances, we could all be a victim—or a killer.
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Good-Bye to a Storyteller
Best known for a crime fiction series with supernatural elements set in the Welsh borders, he wrote what I think of as multidimensional stories—stories you can read and enjoy on a superficial level, but which can also draw you in deeper to consider your own beliefs and values.
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What Happens When You Get a Bad Review?
Every book, at one time or another, gets a bad review.
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Why Not Read a Classic Mystery?
You’ve probably heard me talking about the “golden age of mystery fiction.” So… what exactly am I talking about?
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Be Afraid… Be Very Afraid!
Stories are never about what they’re about: they always allow the space for us to bring our own emotions and experience — and, here, fears — into the mix.
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When the Beginning Isn’t the Beginning
Even as we tend to identify with the detective in a mystery, there’s also a part of each of us that also understands the fear or need that drove the killer to act, to protect themselves in the only way they saw possible.
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When Great Artists Do Terrible Things
So at the end of all this I’m still left with a sense of ambiguity. Is there a way to hold both of these truths together? To say of someone that they are both great and awful? Or do we feel that listening to their words, now that we know the truth, becomes somehow tainted?
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Is Technology a Writer’s Friend?
I really liked this book. It was fun to write. But it took me rather a long time to write it—this was quite a while before I became a fulltime writer. And something happened between my starting the novel and finishing it.
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Worried About Code-Switching? Try and Go a Day Without It!
Where it becomes an issue worth examining is when people’s dialects or versions of a given language are perceived by the dominant culture as somehow inferior to the “real” version of the language. To “fit in,” they’re forced to change how they speak.
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Write Like an Actor
How would an actor approach your protagonist? How would they take your description and the situation into which you’ve plunged the character, and make that character unforgettable?
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Why Stories?
Yes, it’s true: I live in my head. Wherever my current story ideas take me. To Cuba or Nepal or California. With people who sing, or tend cows, or—sometimes—commit murder. And those places and those people are real. They may not even make it out of my head, but for the time they’re there? They are still very real.
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What’s in a Name?
My characters come to life as I write, not before. They shift and morph and often change the entire narrative arc of my stories. They become who they are in chapter five, or eight, or ten. So the name I started with generally just doesn’t fit the character as they emerge, as they talk with other characters, as they make choices, as they tell me where the book needs to go.
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Anything Can Happen
My brain sometimes feels like it’s about to explode. Mostly this has to do with my distress at the state of the world and my ever-present naïve wonderment at the greed and cruelty of so much—or so it seems—of humanity.
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