Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2013 i The Writer

OFTEN IN THE MORNING BETWEEN PROJECTS, I’ll steal away from the office to run along a nearby river. I usually tell my colleagues I have a meeting – and I do. A meeting with my mind. It’s the time and circumstance in which I do my best thinking about writing. The bigger secret is that I’m listening to musicals when I run. The pairing is unlikely, but I’ve found that show tunes provide two key elements for inspiration: the familiarity of the music allows my brain to relax, and the lyrics can trigger a playfulness in my inner wordplay. Not heady stuff, but it leads to a freedom of thought I find hard to achieve at my computer. And as meetings go, it’s more productive than most. Writers know the…

Wendy Lesser I WAS A WRITER BEFORE I ever edited anything, but the most important thing I know about writing, I learned from my work as an editor. And that is: Each article or story contains within it its own perfect version, and if you can just get enough distance to see that perfect version, you can unearth it through cuts, rearrangements and local rewrites. I have several methods of acquiring the necessary distance. I handwrite the first draft and then correct as I type. I reread each day’s work at the end of every day and make further changes. Finally, I print out a complete draft – with a book, I may do this at monthly intervals – and rewrite it, again and again, until the writing has no…

In November, we asked The Writer Facebook followers to create a guest list for their holiday tables. We received farranging responses, and many of the usual suspects showed up in multiple posts. Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway topped the list, followed closely by Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Ray Bradbury, C.S. Lewis and William Shakespeare. We can’t help including a few honorable mentions: James Baldwin, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Parker, Tony Hillerman, George Sand, Sherman Alexie, Toni Morrison – and Cesar Milan. Talk about a feast. As we’re celebrating the winners of the The Writer’s 2012 Short-Story Contest (see page 26), we asked FB fans to recommend favorite short stories. Here is a selection from the list. • The Lottery by Shirley Jackson • The Thing Around Your Neck…

Some 70 years ago, the famous New York book critic and socialite Dorothy Parker readily admitted that some books served much better as projectiles flung from her window than as works of literature. “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force,” she wrote of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. While Parker’s witty, ruthless reviews once appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, Vogue and Vanity Fair, there’s a high probability that they might never make it into print today. Hard-copy real estate on the printed page and dwindling staffs have significantly affected both authors and critics by dictating what kind of book is reviewed and what kind of review gets printed. Four book reviewers gathered last fall at Harvard University to…

a class act to the core – that’s Lord Fellowes of West Stafford, better known to the world as celebrated English scribe Julian Fellowes. A smooth-penned seducer, Fellowes is the creator, sole writer and executive producer of the monster-hit miniseries Downton Abbey, the sleek saga of upper-class Anglo-angst that’s renewed a cultural addiction to smart British period drama. Now in its third season as a Masterpiece Classic presentation on PBS, Downton enters post-World War I England, where the upper-crust Crawley household – from lords to ladies’ maids – braves a ceaseless tide of personal traumas. Downton’s legions of fans are dauntlessly diehard, a credit to Fellowes’ roiling plots, clever characters and smoothly sly dialogue – plus the show’s lush sets and costumes. But the Emmy Award-winning Downton is hardly Fellowes’…

Amy Purcell (first) Douglas Fetterly (second) and Paul Weidknecht (third). Read the opening lines of the runners-up here. For the full text of all three stories, visit writermag.com. SECOND PLACE They Smell Like Horses By Douglas Fetterly SHE SEEMED OUT OF PLACE. Skinny little gal up at the bar. I didn’t pay much attention to her at first, except for the landscape between those tall, flashy Justin boots and the rugged, handsome cowboy etched into her short, brown suede skirt. I couldn’t tell if she belonged here in God’s country, but she seemed very much at home. Jake, the old bartender, was leaning on the bar a little askew, like bartenders do when they don’t want to face you dead-on. He was chatting up a storm with her as though…

▸ Robbins, 58, graduated from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., with a bachelor’s degree in theater and speech. He went on to complete his law degree in 1980, but a year later abandoned his legal career and became a writer. ▸ War of the Rats and The End of War, his second and third novels, placed Robbins on the New York Times bestseller’s list. ▸ In 2002, Robbins co-founded the James River Writers, a nonprofit organization with an annual writer’s conference. ▸ He is the chairman and co-founder of the Podium Foundation. Podium provides platforms of creative expression for Richmond public school students and support and training for teachers of writing and the arts. Podium publishes a yearly literary journal. ▸ Robbins adapted his novel Scorched…

The publishing landscape of the 21st century is bumpy and difficult to navigate. Writers hoping to land a publishing deal need to be equipped with both a killer manuscript and a strong author platform. Publishers are looking for slam dunks, but no honest acquiring editor can tell you he or she really knows what a slam dunk looks like. Your status as a previously published author is only meaningful if your previous book performed well and isn’t more than a few years old. But in the current publishing climate, your book is no longer your only important asset. You are: your brand, your platform and what you bring to the table. There’s understandable grumbling among aspiring authors about publishing houses these days. It’s easy to find gripes online about publishing…

Colin Channer was born and raised in Jamaica and moved to New York at the age of 19. His first novel, Waiting in Vain, was a national best seller, and the Washington Post selected it as a Critic’s Choice. Since then, Channer has published two novellas, one novel, and a short-story collection and has edited two fiction anthologies, most recently Kingston Noir in 2012. He has also taught at universities throughout the U.S., has won Jamaica’s Silver Musgrave Medal for literature, and, with poet Kwame Dawes, co-founded the Caribbean’s Calabash International Literary Festival. He is currently Fannie Hurst writer-in-residence at Brandeis University. His third novel, Lover’s Rock, will be published in July 2013. Channer cites reggae music as a major influence on his work, and his fiction strongly features the…

A simple Google news search returns hundreds of hits for feature articles, news updates and social media notes about the volleyball player Kerri Walsh. And that is from only the last month. Writing about someone who has been widely covered in the local, national and international media for nearly two decades can be daunting for any writer and extends far beyond the coverage of athletes. Actors, musicians, politicians – in a digital age, most people in the public eye are written about on a regular, if not daily, basis. How do you come up with new angles and ask questions that have not been posed before? One tactic is to tailor questions to the specific outlet for which you are writing. When speaking with Walsh, a three-time Olympic gold medalist,…

IN TERMS OF LENGTH, a novella falls between a short story and a novel and runs roughly 15,000 to 80,000 words. It’s not quite short enough to be considered “short,” but it’s not a full-fledged novel, either. Still, a novella requires the same attention to craft as the other forms. In particular, a novella should have fully fleshed-out characters and a tension that builds intensity to a satisfying – although not pat – ending. The length of a work of fiction is tied to the scope of the conflict; the longer the fiction, the wider the scope. A short story might cover one facet of a conflict. Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story A Temporary Matter follows a couple in a strained relationship over the course of a few days when utility…

“Creativity finds a way,” my artist friend stated, Zenlike, while I lamented my lack of progress on my novel. I recalled her words as I turned a large cardboard box into a puppet theater for my kids. I cut out a rectangle for the stage and fashioned a simple curtain from paper clips, florist wire and a scrap of red velvet. My book was going nowhere. But the puppet theater was fabulous. Also fabulous: My newly decorated living room, thanks to frequent trips to antique and thrift shops and a couple of gallons of lime green paint, a color I find particularly stimulating. Have I mentioned the flowerbed in the backyard? My book was going nowhere. But have you tasted my apple custard pie? The world is full of writing…

An aspiring writer working in a bookstore is a giant cliché. As my friend said when I told him about my job: “Loves to write, works at a bookstore. I’m reserving the movie rights.” Yet, faced with clothing retail or foodservice positions because writing and editorial jobs were scarce after graduating last May, selling books didn’t seem so bad. Besides, there had to be something luring those other aspiring writers to the bookselling field. Perhaps a publishing company would someday be impressed by my ability to recite the bestsellers from July 2012, or at the very least, I’d collect an intimate knowledge of what books and magazines sell and maybe even develop a hypothesis of why they sell so well. But mostly, I hoped that creative genius would be contagious…

THEY STOOD IN THE LONG, outdoor aisle of Fences and Decking at Home Depot. She studied chain link, while he inspected pre-fabricated vinyl panels and planks of untreated wood. The afternoon sun was so terribly bright and heavy that she imagined it dropping from the sky and burning everything before her. She looked up, toward the whirring buzz just above her head, and watched a bottom-heavy carpenter bee slowly bore another hole into the old wooden scaffolding that held the thick coils of chain. The new hole was perfectly round, like the others. She’d watched the bee work the night before, and the night before that when they had come here, arguing over which kind of fence would keep the dogs in the yard. Now, she glanced at her husband…

The Writer’s 2012 Short-Story Contest winner Amy Purcell lives in Ohio and is finishing a graduate degree in creative writing. It seems fitting that her day job is as director of communications at Luxottica, a company that produces fashion, luxury and sports eyewear – because she envisions the world of her story Home Repair so sharply, with an eye for detail and dialogue. We asked her to tell us about the evolution of the piece and about her life as a writer. The following is an excerpt from a conversation with TW editor Alicia Anstead. How did you get started writing Home Repair? I’m in the M.F.A. program at Penn State University and was given an assignment in the fiction workshop to write a short short. We were doing renovations,…

In 2004, Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ stunned Hollywood by grossing more than $600 million worldwide at the box office and nearly $1 billion in total revenue. Soon after, fantasy series with Christian allegory or symbolism, such as C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, were also big box-office hits. About that same time, Stephen and Alex Kendrick, associate pastors at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Ga., heard their pastor give a sermon exhorting followers to “find ways to change the world from Albany.” They took their love for filmmaking and, engaging their church members as actors and extras, began producing the films Flywheel, Facing the Giants, Fireproof and Courageous. The latter two had budgets of $500,000 and $1 million, respectively. Both opened in more than 1,000 theaters and grossed…

Attend The Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Conference & Bookfair in Boston this year, and you’ll find yourself immersed in the world of literature at what is touted as “the largest literary conference in North America.” Christian Teresi, director of conferences at AWP, likens the conference to “a great public square [for creative writing communities] to come together.” The purpose of the AWP conference, he says, is to bring as many viewpoints together as possible, as well as to facilitate face-to-face connections. “In the virtual age, people desire real social capital. Those kinds of interactions are becoming increasingly precious. Since more people than ever now have access to opportunities and outlets to express and discuss the literary arts, it seemed natural to create an annual conference that could allow…

Taunya Wright, registered nurse and self-published author of Lemonade and Wild Honey (books one and two in her Brady Boe series for children), sits on her porch in Nashville, Tenn., with her favorite writing aid. Alain Trottier carried his copy of The Writer to the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort, where the Emperor Shah Jahan was once imprisoned by his son Aurangzeb. Trottier found inspiration within the pages of the magazine and in pietra dura, a mosaic technique that decorates the two monuments.…

With 50 percent of Americans now owning smart phones and tablets, our electronics play dual roles as radios, navigators, itineraries and more. So why not use them to write? As the iPhone mantra reminds us, “There’s an app for that.” We scoured the app store and found the top 10 tools for productivity, brainstorming and, of course, writing. 1. Evernote Cost: Free An absolute must-have for all writers, this app compiles your ideas, research, to-do lists, images and notes in one organized place. Sync your computer’s Evernote app with your phone so they’re always at your fingertips. 2. WriteChain Cost: Free This handy little app keeps your writing on track. Set your daily word count goal, enter details about each writing session and review past entries. The more consistently you…

If you’re a regular reader of this magazine, The Writer’s Notebook II will appeal to you. The anthology’s craft essays – based on seminars offered at the annual Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop in Portland, Ore., as well as mostly original work from contributors to the literary magazine Tin House and its book division – cover subjects found in the pages of The Writer: how to write spectacular beginnings and endings, whether you should write what you know or what you don’t know and how your day job can inspire or otherwise affect your writing, for example. That the writers of these essays are noteworthy authors themselves – Ann Hood, Aimee Bender, Steve Almond, Benjamin Percy and Karen Russell, among others – only adds to the pleasure of this collection.…

I get annoyed by the voice in my head, by the limits of its diction, by how certain it can seem of its own perspective, by how it too often wants to be heard when it should listen. It presides, a domineering minister over the rowdy parliament in my braincase, outshouting the vibrant din of all those other voices speaking there. There’s Jackson starting so many of his stories, One time, my uncle Dewey…. And Jackson’s dad Jack offering his trademark riddle: What’s the difference between a duck? And Traci telling any story about how she grew up Mormon and moved graciously away from the Latter Day Saints. Or my mother advising: Put the ginger in first and the garlic in later or the garlic goes bitter. Or my father…

In Home Repair the author isolates an original and revelatory moment in the lives of her characters. They find themselves faced with a small, seemingly manageable problem, and yet in trying to solve it, the various fissures in their relationship start to tremble like fault lines. The eruption is controlled and nuanced, and in the author’s restraint, we understand how deeply wounded the characters are; we understand that for all of the seeming simplicity of the problem they faced, the larger and deeper perils of their relationship are far more complex, for more threatening, and far closer to the surface than anyone—not least the characters—would have expected or hoped. The story makes very fine use of its setting, and of dialogue. The author never falls into cliché or pat reactions…

David L. Robbins is one of the most positive and vibrant people you’ll ever meet. He’s successfully written 10 novels, two screenplays and adapted Scorched Earth, his third novel, for the stage. As the son of two World War II veterans (his parents met at Pearl Harbor) and the product of a blue-collar upbringing in Sandston, Va., Robbins has a strong work ethic and optimistic outlook. Even when challenged with a major publishing transition for his newest book, The Devil’s Waters, he exuded a kind of primal confidence: no problems. Only curious impasses and opportunities to find creative bridges to the other side. Robbins now lives in Richmond and teaches creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth College. To a classroom of new students, the six-foot-six writer is both blunt and effervescent.…

Author Beth Garland had heard of the Veterans Writing Project – a nonprofit offering no-cost writing seminars for veterans and family members – so when she saw that VWP planned to launch a literary journal, she sent in her short story Reintegration. “I wanted very much to convey the incredible dignity and bravery that real soldiers and their spouses who are coping with PTSD or severe injuries demonstrate every day,” she says, “while at the same time revealing how human they are.” Garland is married to a member of 20th Special Forces Group. She believes American pop culture has romanticized the concept of a soldier’s homecoming. As her narrator in Reintegration observes, “You imagined that after he’d grabbed you up in his arms like Richard Gere did Debra Winger in…

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