Writing
how a book is born
where great ideas come from, plus advice
by christoph niemann, via Swissmiss.
also, the very best writing advice, via john steinbeck and brain pickings, a brilliant site that I’m ker-azy about. my favorite quote of all:
“If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.”
Read Morewhat are your favorite book titles?
Ugh, titles. It’s hard to write a good one. Many of the contenders for my book were such stinkers that I’m embarrassed just thinking about them. I finally hit on How Lucky You Are as I was reading through one of the final drafts and spotted the phrase in a pivotal scene. It was immediately obvious–like, “Duh, of course this is The One” obvious.
That said, it’s fun to think of titles when the pressure’s off. (Well, fun for me, at least!) I have lots of them just waiting to be attached to something.
What are some of your favorites? My best friend loves The Winter of Our Discontent. Now, that’s a title.
Some goodies from my bookshelf:
The Bonfire of the Vanities
The Beautiful and Damned
Wallflower at the Orgy
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The Optimist’s Daughter
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
A Moveable Feast
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
The Liars’ Club
A Good Man is Hard to Find
Light in August
Tender is the Night
Atlas Shrugged
The Ten-Year Nap
The House of Mirth
Read Moreliterary legos
This week, my big girl’s class is discussing classic nursery rhymes and fairy tales. She came home from school today and asked me to get out a candlestick so that she could “jump over it like Jack.” Then, when we were playing Legos, she came up with this:
Can you guess what it is?
“The Princess and the Pea”
Kind of genius, I think. And hilarious.
Read Morequotable
“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.” –Arnold Toynbee
Did you see this Jhumpa Lahiri essay over the weekend? She’s one of my favorite writers, easily in the top five, so I’m apt to think that anything she does is perfect, but this is just about the most perfect essay about writing that I’ve ever read.
Read Moretybee
After you read this, you might hate me a little bit. Last week, I participated in the first annual Mermaid Cottages Writer’s Retreat. Designed to raise interest in the arts, accepted writers are invited to stay in historic cottages on Tybee Island, GA, right outside of Savannah. In exchange for your stay, you’re asked to write a piece, 1500 w minimum, of any genre, about Tybee.
My parents live twenty minutes from Tybee. They said they would be happy to watch the girls.
While I go write for four days.
In a cottage by the sea.
Did I write? Yeah. Thirty pages of the new book plus some miscellaneous work. But I also took long walks on the beach, hung out with my dog, read and read and read, napped, and ate my weight in local shrimp. (I also attended the Savannah Book Festival. I heard Amy Hatvany give a great talk. Pat Conroy spoke in the church where I was married. Stephen King headlined. It really was a beautifully run festival.)
I stayed in the “Flip Flop” cottage, one of the original Jane Coslick cottages.
My crappy camera phone shots surely don’t do it justice. I’m no photographer.
This was two blocks away:
That’s the historic Tybee lighthouse, also just a couple of blocks from my cottage. It’s in the historic Fort Screven area, where many of the buildings have been turned into adorable homes, like this one, the base’s former bakery, which you can just barely see because I was so focused on the World’s Most Perfect Tree Swing (and check out that Spanish moss):
It really was a terrible time. I can hardly believe that I was subjected to such torture.
If you’re interested in applying for next year (and ya should be!), here’s the link.
Read MoreHello!
Welcome to my website. I’m a veteran magazine writer and author. My debut novel, HOW LUCKY YOU ARE, will be published by Grand Central Publishing on September 4th.
