This the Palazzo Donn’Anna, in Naples, the memory of which launched my second historical novel, Swimming in the Moon (2013). My Italian teacher grew up in the vast apartment on the second floor, full of marble, Venetian glass, and monumental…
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Where invention comes from, maybe
Tagged with: fiction writing, historical novel, Inspiration for Novel, Palazzo Donn'Anna
Posted in Writing
Posted in Writing
Peeking Behind the Myth
Here’s one of the 10-minute exercises from a writing workshop I just did for the Knoxville Writers Guild on using real people in fiction or memoir. In this exercise, we looked at making a more rounded vision of a historical…
Tagged with: Fiction exercises, Knoxville Writers Guild, Real people in fiction, writing prompts
Posted in Writing
Posted in Writing
Can you blame Helen (of Troy)?
It’s good thing for this country that the Puritans never quite figured out how to combine a theology of predestination with an ethical system. And it’s a very good thing for novelists. Free will makes plots much more interesting than…
Tagged with: creating characters, Free Will, Helen of Troy, Margaret George, Oedipus, plotting novels
Posted in Writing
Posted in Writing
Life gives writing prompt
The other day I was crossing the parking lot of the Knoxville Museum of Art when a young man got out of a dusty van wearing a full length tie-dyed robe. Time warp to the Sixties? He seemed to be…
What’s your excuse?
“Writer’s block” adds a lovely sense of entitlement and specialness to the malaise. After all, nobody sanctions “pediatrician’s block” or “fireman’s block,” as in: “You know, I just don’t feel like taking care of your kid, or putting out your…
Onions & the Cost of Fiction
Some years ago, I came across a recipe for onion flowers, saw therein a metaphor for the cost of writing fiction, and wrote about that. I made a simplified onion flower today and thought I’d share the original piece with…
Dangers of over-describing
At a recent literary conference, a speaker was warning of “drivers license descriptions.” That is, the character appears on the scene trailing specifics: “Tommy Lengley, 6’1″, blonde, tanned, well-built, with a faint scar on his left cheek . . .…
Novel writing & bridge building
At the Southern Literature Conference in Chattanooga yesterday, the wonderful novelist/short story writer, Alan Garganus, had a great analogy on novel (and I suppose short story) building. Suppose you want to build a bridge over a canyon. You throw a…
Carnivorous typewriter
All in the line of research, I found an image of this carnivorous-looking typewriter, circa 1915. Writing is difficult enough, uncertain enough, and imagine if you had to be right up close to this scary thing hour after hour. Doesn’t…
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