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creative writing

Literary Orders of Operations

April 27, 2011
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Recently, I was having a conversation with a fellow writer about order – not the kind of order you place when you want to purchase a book from Amazon.com or the order that’s the opposite of disorder. Rather, we were discussing the order of stories (in my case) and poems (in my acquaintance’s case) as they appear in collections.

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Spontaneous Storytelling

April 11, 2011
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I was asked to entertain a four-year-old while her mother – my friend – ran some errands. The little girl wanted to hear a story and refused to nap until I told her one. Because I write short stories, I figured that coming up with a story would be easy. However, the girl had some requirements. The story must include a rooster and a magic carpet.

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Reading Is the Introduction

March 30, 2011
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When my students hand in their final drafts, I ask them to include a paragraph describing the workshop experience. Most of my students tell me that workshop does nothing to help them revise, and that they usually just wait for my comments because mine are the most helpful. Again and again, workshop fails them. I need the workshop model to work.

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On Being Honest with Yourself

March 21, 2011
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In my perfect world, I would hire an on-call editor to critique every draft of everything I write. However, I can’t afford an editor, and I haven’t yet found someone I trust enough as a reader. A handful of my friends read my work, but they aren’t trained to push me in the direction that I want to be pushed as a writer.

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Oh No, I Said Too Much

February 21, 2011
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One of the questions that my students most frequently ask me is, “How much detail is enough, and how much detail is too much?”. Recently, I asked them to write original flash fiction, which is a very short story, always under 500 words but sometimes as short as one page long. I told my students that their work could not exceed two pages, double-spaced.

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