“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
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
Finishing a project brings about two contradictory emotions: exaltation and dread. On one hand, birthing an idea and witnessing its metamorphosis from squirming caterpillar to a shimmering creature capable of flight offers a sense of gratification few things can. We mere mortals accomplished a feat of God-like proportions: we brought something into being that previously didn’t exist! … Continue reading
“John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth.”- Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief “The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only … Continue reading
For me, writing has always been a steamy love affair. Whenever I can, I snatch a few moments to scribble: when I have five minutes to kill before heading to work, when I’m waiting on my boyfriend to finish getting ready for dinner. Writing is something I lust after. Yet at times writing is a temperamental … Continue reading
Why I write. I stole the title of this piece from Joan Didion who stole it from George Orwell. “I write,” she confessed in her superb 1976 essay, “to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Much like … Continue reading
All writers occasionally doubt themselves when they revisit their work. “You, a writer?!?” our censors scoff, “can your sentences be any more choppy?” “And that ending? Could you conclude in a more predictable way? I thought we did away with ‘in the end’ and ‘all and all’ in 2nd grade?” Suddenly, our work, our whole … Continue reading
When contemplating a piece of work, Julia Cameron advises we’d do better to think whom is this work for? whom will it serve? rather than how will it serve me? Pondering this notion of art as service, I’m reminded of Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s luminous Letters to a Young Poet, a collection of his five … Continue reading
The Blank-Faced Confidante 