During a recent class, I discussed rhythm, starting with a passage from Ursula Le Guin’s excellent Steering the Craft, and moving on to Virginia Woolf’s equally excellent explanation: “Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words.” Simple, right? I then read aloud one […]
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Summertime Reading!
Two of my clients are publishing books this summer. First up is David Flinn’s Climb Like a Mzungu, which is available through Amazon starting Friday, June 23. My other client, Jasmin Attia, won the 2022 Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature. Her book, The Oud Player of Cairo, will be published on August 1, […]
The Editor’s Burden; Or, Why We Proofread
Editors read differently from people who are not editors. A part of our brain holds an imaginary red pen and corrects punctuation as we read, chooses stronger verbs, strikes out adverbs, and always, always, fixes typos and misspellings. The red pen doesn’t get too much use in published books, but I am not surprised when […]
Building Characters
I was reminded in class the other day of a writing exercise that I call Building Characters. The idea came to me from a chapter in a student’s memoir, about a bus trip her family took in Great Britain and Western Europe in the early 1960s. The group was an intriguing collection of characters—starting with […]
“I’m Doing the Best I Can”
For my birthday last year, a friend gave me a book, one that I probably would not have bought for myself because it’s a memoir. I don’t tend to read memoirs. But I loved the title: All the Way to the Tigers. Who wouldn’t be intrigued? And the author’s name rang a bell—Mary Morris. I […]
Revisions
Some writers have told me they dread revisions. They love the initial creation of a work—a poem, essay, short story, novel; that rush of excitement as the ideas flow, as the words pour out effortlessly and they seem to enter an out-of-body state. Revisions aren’t like that. Revisions can mean staring at the screen or […]