Thoughts about writing, and the universe.
My students and I these past two weeks have been exploring language and gender. We have considered how women and men might use language differently (conclusion: any differences there are are slight), and how language represents gender (see this fascinating though unsurprising, and ultimately disturbing look at the words books have most frequently used to... Continue Reading →
America has been troubling. The consumer push is thicker than I ever remember, the pressure to buy big and often and right now. Things are far larger than they need to be. It's a difficult relationship, I think, that I've got to my home country. For moments I wish I had been born somewhere else.... Continue Reading →
I return today to a question that has arisen frequently on this blog, that nagging issue in fiction I've not yet been satisfied with my own answers to, that I feel like this week I've stumbled haphazard into a new idea about--today, let's circle back to that question of conflict. When I taught high school... Continue Reading →
Following the example of the ancient priest who is said to have travelled thousands of miles caring naught for his provisions and attaining the state of sheer ecstasy under the pure beams of the moon, I left my broken house on the River Sumida in the August of the first year of Jyลkyล among the... Continue Reading →
I've been working on a short story recently. Unlike most of what I've been writing the last few years, it's solid realism. I didn't expect this to make it a particular challenge for me, but as I have been slogging my way through outlines, a first draft of one-and-a-quarter scenes, doubt has besieged me of... Continue Reading →
For some time I've been curious about the idea so prevalent in modern Western literature that a central conflict is indispensable to effective storytelling. In my own writing, sure there's conflict, and when I read, clearly it abounds. But is conflict really the core of it? Is conflict really what's making the story engaging? The... Continue Reading →
There are a lot of rules we set ourselves as writers. We try to show-not-tell, to make our characters round, to begin our stories with a conflict. We teach them to our students, preach them like the gospel, cite them in critiques, and write them core in every novel. And for (mostly) good reason. People... Continue Reading →
Words like trees 