Tag: writing life

  • Putting Together A Short Fiction Collection

    Putting Together A Short Fiction Collection

    You’ve been writing stories. Some have appeared in magazines and anthologies. A few are still making the rounds. And a few more—possibly the best of the lot—don’t seem to be a good fit for the current markets. But one thing’s for sure. You’ve got enough for a collection. So what do you do? Next week,…

  • Writing & Resilience

    Writing & Resilience

    Later this morning, I’m leaving for Milford, the town where Damon Knight, James Blish, and Virginia Kidd helped establish science fiction as a respected literary genre and where The Virginia Kidd Literary Agency still operates out of Kidd’s former residence. Blish and Kidd dubbed their residence Arrowhead, and during the 1960s it served as a…

  • Writing in Private

    Writing in Private

    “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.” So said Ernest Hemingway when accepting the Nobel Prize in 1954. And yet, a few decades earlier (according to his recollections in A Moveable Feast) he wrote many of his short stories in public—surrounded by (and occasionally taking inspiration from) the strangers who came and went as…

  • Overcoming Writer’s Block:Bono, R.E.M. & The Doorway Effect

    Overcoming Writer’s Block:
    Bono, R.E.M. & The Doorway Effect

    Some of the best advice for overcoming writer’s block comes from U2’s Bono by way of R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe. At least, I think that’s the case … though try as I might, I can’t locate any record of the interview. Nor do I recall anything else said in the interview or even if I came…

  • Surviving World War C:
    Music to Span the Social Distance

    Last week’s post offered a list of “Podcasts for Shut-Ins,” which included what was then an unreleased installment of Inside The Hive. Although I had expected that podcast to feature an interview with screenwriter Scott Burns (Contagion), it instead offered a conversation with radio host Kai Ryssdal (Marketplace). Titled “Coronovirus against the World,” the interview…

  • Writer at Work: Trusting the Process

    There’s a scene in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso, a 1956 documentary that shows the artist Pablo Picasso at work. The artist starts with random lines, splashes of color. There seems to be no method in what he’s doing, but soon a few recognizable images emerge — a boat pulling a water skier, a woman…