Guest Blogger P.A. Cornell explores measuring success with writing . . . when can you call yourself a writer? Not so long ago I was speaking with someone about how much I’m enjoying being a short fiction writer. I was trying to convey all the great opportunities that short fiction can offer: variety in setting and characters, finding your voice, etc. They kept nodding, but I could tell my words weren’t really penetrating, and when I finished, they said, “Okay…but why think so small? You’re working on a novel, right? I mean, go big or go home is where it’s at!” Is it though? In our society we tend to equate success with tangible things like fame and income, and this does have some validity, but is this the right measure of success for all of us? When it comes to writing, there are some very specific…
Month: November 2020
Number Please. Prompt #534
Do you remember the phone number you grew up with? Write about a memorable conversation on that phone or a memorable conversation in the kitchen or living room or bedroom of your childhood home.
Write hot. Revise Cool.
“As Ray Bradbury says, don’t rewrite—relive. Your fiction is about creating emotion in the reader, and you can’t do that well without feeling it yourself.” —”The Geyser Approach To Revision,” James Scott Bell, July/August 2011 Writer’s Digest Note from Marlene: This is true for memoir writing also. “You’ve finished your first draft . . . You’ve written hot. Now you’re ready to revise cool with the help of creative spurts. . . . wait at least two weeks before you do a first read-through of a draft. Then, go through it as fast as possible, as if you were a reader, resisting the urge to tweak anything just yet.” Good advice for those who can do this. This isn’t my style, but it might be yours. I do agree with waiting to revise. Let go of the attachment to your writing, your beautiful writing. Keep your darlings in a separate…
Telling Your Truth
“Telling your truths—the difficult ones and the joyful ones and all the ones between—is a big part of what makes for good writing. It is also what brings you pleasure in the process of writing. Most people who create and tend a garden don’t spend time on their knees pulling weeds just for the perfect end result—the gorgeous display of flowers that others will exclaim over. They pore over gardening books, order bulbs, water a sickly shrub, arrange the flagstones to make a pleasing path, all because they enjoy the doing of it. So, too, it should be with your writing. You want to see your writing grow, to find your daily work absorbing, to discover you can do better on the page than you could three years ago. None of this will happen if you shy away from the truth. The rewards that you seek are the rewards that…
The Most Fun We Ever Had
“The Most Fun We Ever Had” by Claire Lombardo is one of a handful of books I read a second time, right after the first reading. I read quickly the first time to find out what would happen. I read carefully the second time to savor passages and to try to understand the structure. The second reading also helped to understand the characters and their actions. This book is complex with traveling back and forth in time, and switching point of view, making it hard to know who “she” and “he” are referring to. I think, with some editing, the pronouns could be made clearer and there could be consistent ellipses and em-dash usage. I grew to like this family, like comfortable slippers. They took some getting used to. I didn’t really like the parents until trouble, in the name of Gillian, surfaced. Reading this during the Covid-19 pandemic, the…