I overwrite at times. I don’t mean long phrase-upon-phrase, clause-upon-clause, description-upon-description sentences as, say, Virginia Woolf does. If I were capable of writing sentences like this from Mrs. Dalloway— The British middle classes sitting sideways on the tops of omnibuses with parcels and umbrellas, yes, even furs on a day like this, were, she thought, more ridiculous, more unlike … [Read more...]

I wrote a post a few months ago about how a children’s movie used an important plotting technique—that is, when a protagonist solves one problem, she or he should be confronted by a worse problem. Now advice from a documentary filmmaker, whose mother is a student of mine. Ginny was frustrated with the plotting of her latest novel, so her son told her he’d read it and see if he had any … [Read more...]

Further on the subject of practice. It may not necessarily make perfect (although a cat practicing the art of sleeping does appear to reach perfection), but practice does make better. And more practice makes better faster. That was, more or less, my daughter’s conclusion after completing an assignment for her high-school sociology class, which required her to do something for thirty days. She … [Read more...]

A friend of mine took this photograph, one of about twenty he snapped of this grasshopper on a summer day. And one of the thousands and thousands and thousands of pictures he took over his lifetime. Just a visual example of that old joke: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. … [Read more...]