Writing · Thoughts
Essays and reflections on writing, culture, history, community, and the ideas that stay with us.
Like a roller-coaster ride at a fun-fair, fiction allows us to experience terror without it being real, without it having any lasting impact on our lives; we become voyeurs in horror, safe in the knowledge that it’s not true.
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Think of not knowing what life is and then finding out: a book suddenly learning how to read; a rock jutting out into the sea suddenly knowing the thump and splatter of the waves, the taste of salt.
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Writers think and create in isolation. Your isolation is really your workspace. No matter where you are physically, you’re simultaneously alone: it’s in your mental solitude that you build your story, that you interact with your characters, that you listen to the inner narrative voice guiding your craft. Isolation isn’t optional; it’s essential.
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We mystery readers really, really like to read about death. Suspicious deaths, orchestrated deaths, clever deaths, carefully planned deaths. What is up with that?
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Getting rid of what we don’t need, what we’ve outgrown, what is cluttering our minds and hearts as well as our homes and offices, means there is space to add different things and experiences and people. It can help us rewrite the story of who we are.
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The method is simple. You think or pray your question or intention, close your eyes, open the book at a random page, and point somewhere on the page. The line or passage you’ve pointed to is your answer.
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Let’s start big. Leave off everything that’s sensible and practical and for just one moment, let your heart take wing. What is your dream vision for your writing practice? Take some time—an hour, a day—and just let your imagination run wild.
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Will you be writing new year’s resolutions that will support your writing practice and help it flourish?
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Most authors function perfectly well putting the story first, and that actually may be exactly the way it should be. Yet here I remain.
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The fact that these truths are wrapped up in a story is what gives them power. It contextualizes them and shows, sometimes dramatically, what they mean to us.
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So—read fiction. Read lots of fiction. Read about life on imagined planets and life in 12th-century France. Read about people who build castles and people who are driven to madness. Read about good people, broken people, strong people, evil people. They’ll all make you a better person. Promise!
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There’s nothing more annoying than reading a novel and coming across a glaring mistake—it makes you lose trust in the writer. So it’s always been important for me to create fiction that nestles inside fact, so to speak.
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Any attempts to restore truth as a functioning part of the cultural landscape have been only marginally successful… I recognize there are times when lying is both unavoidable and necessary. But it should never happen because the truth is inconvenient. It should never cause a government, a country, or a person to betray their humanity.
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I’m all for escapism at the moment, and recently I managed to dig out my DVD set of the original David Lynch Twin Peaks series that became such a cult classic. And it drew me in all over again. I’m not a film-maker, but I am a fellow storyteller, and this time around I didn’t just immerse myself in its magic, but tried to analyze how it did what it did.
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So what do we do? The United States under Donald Trump (and he did not create the empire, but has mismanaged it to the point of accelerating its decline) is essentially a “dead empire walking;” it’s all but impossible to return to a healthier point in the trajectory.
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if I read one author for too long, I start thinking/daydreaming/trying to sleep, and whatever it is I’m imagining, however far from the author’s own setting and characters, I do it in their voice.
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Someone or something inspires you—to feel, to seek, to grow, to write. To write better. You may have different names for this entity—spouse, friend, teacher. For many of us, the name is muse.
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Politics are shaped by people, and people can be shaped by the fiction they read—though not always in ways the author intended.
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I didn’t finish watching the series this time around, and a thought came into my head: they couldn’t have done this show now.
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