The Writer June 2018

We talk so much about butt-in-chair time as writers. “A writer is someone who writes,” we say, snidely. And that’s all very true, of course. Books don’t magically write themselves. That niggling story idea in the back of your brain will never come to fruition if you never pick up a pen. Yet so much of my own writing is done with nary a pen in sight. As a cook, I’m a religious believer in the equation of simple ingredients + time = magic. A chicken baptized with salt and time is a thousand times more flavorful than one pulled straight from its packaging. Cabbage and salt, when left alone to their own devices in the dark, become complex, tangy sauerkraut. Fruit macerates, cucumbers pickle, and a three-ingredient marinade turns…

1_Sometimes novelists like to bypass introductions and drop us right in the middle of things. The first sentence of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, for instance: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” I’m sorry, which flowers? Were we discussing flowers? 2_On one level, “the” doesn’t seem to signify much. 3_On a desert island, however, “I drank the water” means something very different from simply “I drank water.” 4_English distinguishes between the definite article “the,” the indefinite article “a,” and the demonstratives “this” and “that.” Some languages have no articles. Japanese is one such language. It has three demonstratives, however, corresponding to “this here,” “that over there near you,” “and that over there near neither of us.” 5_Pun: They paid me ten cents a word for the article; I…

Benjamin Kunkel is a New York-based writer, critic, and co-founder of the literary journal n+1. He is the author of the bestselling novel Indecision, the essay collection Utopia or Bust, and the play Buzz. Kunkel’s writing has also appeared in publications including the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and The New Yorker. WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU’VE LEARNED ABOUT WRITING? AND HOW HAS THIS HELPED YOU AS A WRITER? Obviously everyone who writes wants to write well. But I’ve learned that it’s best to avoid evaluation of your own work until you’ve finished a draft. This is important for me because, like many writers, I’m liable to experiencing extremes of mood, which come from extremes of evaluation, as I…

OUT, DAMNED SPOT! Wash your hands clean of all those killed-off characters with Lady Macbeth’s hand soap. $3.95, theliterarygiftcompany.com A CREATIVITY-BOOSTING CUPPA The first step to overcoming writer’s block is caffeination. Or so we hear. $9.27, amazon.com THE END Not all bookshelves have happy endings. $18, genuinefred.com COOL STORY, POE I KANT EVEN believe you went so long without these punny literature bookmarks. $5, obviousstate.com LITERARY PAPER DOLLS Play with your favorite authors, not with your food. $11.64, amazon.com LIT LAUNDRY For the writer who puts the “shake” in Shakespeare. $23.99, lookhuman.com…

Can you explain the difference between historical fiction and creative nonfiction? Are they interchangeable or are there definite differences between the two? It seems rather blurry to me. In a work of historical fiction, the story takes place in the past, but characters, actions, and other details are fictionalized. Creative nonfiction, on the other hand, is a broad term that encompasses many different types of writing (and, it seems worth noting, not all of it is historical). Creative nonfiction that covers the past uses the tools of dramatization but does not fictionalize. Andrea Barrett’s novella Ship Fever takes place in 1847 and tells the story of a Canadian doctor serving at Grosse Ile, a quarantine station for Irish immigrants who have fallen ill while fleeing the famine. The novella is…

Pinpointing the heart and soul of your story can take several steps. You might start off with an overall idea of how you want to structure the beginning, middle, and end of a chapter, an essay, or even an entire book, but when you put your pen to the paper, or your fingers to the keys, you might find that additional stories are popping up as you go along. You start reconsidering the path of your story. You may even notice that you’re suddenly incorporating several mini-stories into your overall plot. But are these new threads helping or hurting your book? How can a writer know if she should keep them, remove and turn them into a separate piece, or develop them into a bigger plotline that will run throughout…