The Writer January 2014

A NEW YEAR IS UPON US, and who knows what lies ahead? You can plan. You can speculate. But the future is unpredictable. That’s a bit like writing itself: You start a story, an essay, a poem, a script, and it’s anybody’s guess – including yours – as to where it will end up. As creative people, we live in that mystery. In fact, in the last 20-plus years of interviewing artistic thinkers – literary, performance and visual – I’ve made a point of asking what advice they have for people who want to be more creative in their lives. Each response was a version of this: Get comfortable with not knowing. While we can’t say exactly what tomorrow will bring, we can do lots to point our compasses toward…

I write to figure life out and consider a work finished when I can say, “That’s it! I got it right on the page.” After publication, I find out new things – from readers. What they tell me about what I wrote keeps enlarging what getting it “right on the page” means. Take the woman who asked me to sign a book at my first reading from Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed, about life in a long marriage. “I so identified with your arguments about how much to leave the window open in February – two inches or less,” she said in a lilting voice. I assumed she was a New Jersey wife like me until, with more lilt, she said: “Make it out to Sister Irene.” She was a…

Chill Ernest Hemingway believed the “quality of a piece could be judged by the quality of the material the author eliminated.” His theory of omission, also called “the iceberg theory,” emphasizes that the core of a good story lies beneath the surface, like the mass of an iceberg. Revise a story, poem or essay by taking a cue from Hemmy and play with subtlety. Use implications to suggest a deeper problem or mystery within the narrative. What explanations or elements can you remove while still maintaining the heart of the piece? Repeat the dream When Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous March on Washington speech, he shared his vision of equality through a technique called anaphora, repeating the phrase “I have a dream” at the beginning of his sentences.…

Francisco Goldman Francisco Goldman is a novelist, journalist and nonfiction writer. Each of his five books has received major accolades. His debut novel The Long Night of White Chickens won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Sue Kaufman Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner. His second novel The Ordinary Seaman, was a finalist for the IMPAC-Dublin and the L.A. Times Book Prize. And his third, Say Her Name, based on his relationship with his wife Aura, who died at the age of 30 in a body-surfing accident, was excerpted in the New Yorker and won the Prix Femina Etranger. Goldman’s prose is lyrical and haunting. You can see this in one sentence from Say Her Name, in which he describes lying in bed with his wife, listening…

A friend drops a manuscript into your lap and asks for feedback. For many, this is an awkward moment, one that puts you – the reader – in a danger zone. What if you don’t like the writing? Do you engage in rank boosterism? Do you decline the task: “I’m just too busy right now to take on more reading.” Or do you dive in, determined to provide constructive criticism? It’s likely we’ve all done a little of each approach, but the last one – constructive criticism – is the bedrock of peer editing in classrooms. To help you focus on the right elements of a manuscript, essay or story you read for a friend – at least one you want to keep as a friend – consider the following…

An imprint is a specialty publisher within a larger publishing house. Penguin Group, for example, has the Penguin line, which publishes books on a wide variety of topics, including literature, memoir, history, business, poetry, self-help and more. The Penguin Group also has nearly 40 imprints (at the time of this writing), each of which has its own niche. One imprint is Current, which publishes science books suitable for the general reader. Puffin Books publishes children’s paperbacks. Another imprint, Avery, publishes books on current health and wellness issues. The size of imprints can vary greatly. Puffin Books publishes about 225 books a year while Current publishes five to eight new titles a year. Some publishing houses have imprints that focus on genre. Harlequin Enterprises, a publishing house that focuses on romance…