The Writer November 2013

Last year, THE WRITER staff conducted a survey in which we asked readers what area of writing interests them the most. The largest percentage replied: book-length fiction, followed closely by short fiction. Surveys are always tricky, but if I had to put my money on it, I’d bet that writing the “great American novel” (or any country’s “great novel”) is a dream that is alive and well, at least among our readers. That is very exciting, indeed. As our editorial team assembled this issue on the general theme of “making novels,” we approached the topic obliquely with interviews featuring practitioners from several genres talking about how and why they write stories. Andre Dubus III, Hannah Moskowitz, Helena Maria Viramontes, Alexander Maksik, Amor Towles and a bevy of emerging authors were…

Not long ago at a university bookstore, I came across a paperback copy of Richard Bausch’s debut novel Real Presence. The paperback caught my eye because many years back, Bausch was my first writing teacher, and I’ve followed his career through publications, interviews, reviews and chance encounters with other writers who have cited him as an important influence on their writing. Real Presence is about an aging and exhausted monsignor who is assigned to a country parish in rural Virginia. His biggest challenge, besides staying awake during confessions, comes in the person of Duck Bexley, who shows up in town with his pregnant wife and five children. The whole Christian agenda is on the line when the Bexleys petition the priest for a place to live despite his desire to…

Helena Maria Viramontes was born and raised in East Los Angeles, Calif., an economically deprived area and the setting for her most recent novel, Their Dogs Came with Them. The story follows the lives of four young Mexican American women who come of age there during the 1960s. Their personal struggles are set against a backdrop of the formation of Chicano gangs, the disruption faced by families as highways are built through the middle of the neighborhood and Quarantine Authority roadblocks, purportedly set up to keep residents safe from rabid animals but that restrict the residents’ freedom of movement. Viramontes is also the author of the novel Under the Feet of Jesus, which follows the lives of a family of migrant farm workers in California and the short story collection…

On November 29, we celebrate the birthdays of three iconic writers: Louisa May Alcott (1832), C.S. Lewis (1898) and Madeleine L’Engle (1918). Decades apart, these birthday triplets transformed the way we write for younger audiences. In honor of the trio, we asked six contemporary children’s writers what influences their work. “The greatest influence on my writing was and is my mother, whose imagination was as wide as the sky. She told stories with paint and canvas, and I do with my pen. I was influenced by the wild stories of her childhood in Peru and the world of paintings and books she surrounded me with as a child. Dr. Seuss was a particular favorite because he showed me that there were no rules, and any limits would be my own.”…

Paula Petty enjoys combining The Writer and coffee along the mountainside in Grecia, Costa Rica, which is a long way from Chattanooga, Tenn., where she lives. Kathleen A McLaughlin, playwright and creative nonfiction writer, catches up on her reading at Otay Mesa in San Diego, Calif. Rex Owens enjoyed catching up on his reading while visiting Librairie Paragraphe Bookstore in Montreal, Quebec. When Jerri Bell goes to Boy Scout camp at Broad Creek Memorial Scout Reservation in Maryland, she reads – until ideas emerge in a fresh and exciting way, leading to an urgent need to work on a new story. Blogger Angela Sanders took her reading to Falls Creek Conference Center in the Arbuckle Mountains of Oklahoma during Falls Creek youth camp, for which she wrote the Christian curriculum.…

Grant Faulkner is executive director of National Novel Writing Month, the annual November event where more than 350,000 writers form a worldwide kickyour-tush support group for 30 days of daily writing. Each person’s goal? A 50,000-word novel by 11:59 p.m. Nov. 30. Participants can update their word count daily or post excerpts from the work-inprogress. They can write with a local group, a virtual group or alone. But write they must. We asked Faulkner to tell us more about the crazy ski-jump event of the literary year. WHAT CAN A WRITER LEARN FROM NANOWRIMO? The best way to write a novel is to simply do it. Make a goal. Set a deadline. Write with abandon – along with a community of support – and you can become a novelist. WHAT’S…