“Read, read, read,” implored William Faulkner, “Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.” Ray Bradbury shared Faulkner’s exuberant enthusiasm for reading, “If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, … Continue reading
Who doesn’t love the Beatles? I didn’t, at least not until later in high school. I dismissed the band, not out of a genuine dislike of their music but for the same reason I rejected Britney Spears and Abercrombie and Fitch: I was pretentious. Like most insufferable hipsters in the early 2000s, I detested anything … Continue reading
I love studying superb sentences. I get almost unparalleled pleasure from uncovering how parts of a sentence work together to produce an effect. You could imagine my delight when I discovered Allegra Hyde’s beautifully-articulated essay “What Makes a Great Opening Line?”. Why, Hyde wonders, does one fall in love at first sentence? In our distracted … Continue reading
I’ve never conceived myself as a fiction writer. Though I’ve loved getting lost in a great story for as long as I can remember (my fondest memories are huddling with the American Girl series under floral covers), I never imagined I could write them myself. Writing stories was for other people, people more imaginative and inventive than myself. As … Continue reading
Master of the macabre Stephen King once said, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” Many aspiring writers think writing requires a magic formula: a certain number of pages or words a day, a particular brand of pencil, a superstitious … Continue reading
The Blank-Faced Confidante 