Posted in Writing, Publishing, children's books, Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, YA Fiction, Book Selling, Novels, Research, Memoir, Writing Craft, Bookstores on Jun 18th, 2013 Comments
Author Lewis Buzbee, interviewed at the request of a listener. (Thanks, Shannon!) We discuss his middle-grade novel Bridge of Time, published by Feiwel and Friends, and his nonfiction book for all readers, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, published by Graywolf.
Today's Write The Book Prompt was suggested by my guest, Lewis Buzbee. He calls this "the memory thief," and it's a timed writing exercise. The memory thief is on his way to your house. You have just ten minutes before he gets there. You get to keep any of your memories that you manage to write down before he arrives. Anything you don't get on paper is lost to you. Write madly, without censoring yourself or taking time to edit. Lewis says that wonderful, weird images will come out of this prompt, and people almost always start in childhood.
Good luck with this exercise and please listen next week for another.
Music credits: 1) "Dreaming 1″ - John Fink; 2) "Filter" - Dorset Greens (a former Vermont band featuring several South Burlington High School graduates).
Read Full Post »
Posted in Writing, Fiction, Politics, Novels, Research, Grief, Psychology, Relationships, Writing Craft, Family, Military on Jun 11th, 2013 Comments
Roxana Robinson, author of five novels and three collections of short stories. Her latest novel is Sparta, published June 4th by Sarah Crichton Books.
Today's Write The Book Prompt was suggested by my guest, Roxana Robinson. The first exercise she always offers to her students is this: write one page, no more, and include two voices and a conflict: nothing but dialogue, and no description. She says what comes from this setup is always interesting. With only dialogue and conflict, the writer naturally supplies everything the reader needs to understand.
Good luck with this exercise and please listen next week for another.
Music credits: 1) "Dreaming 1″ - John Fink; 2) "Filter" - Dorset Greens (a former Vermont band featuring several South Burlington High School graduates).
Read Full Post »
Author and teacher Lawrence Sutin, who publishes books in multiple genres including biography, memoir, history and the novel. At the time we spoke, in December 2009, his latest was When To Go into the Water, published by Sarabande Books.
Today’s Write The Book Prompt is inspired by something I found on Lawrence Sutin’s website - a project he calls Erasure Books. He works with “old, sturdy” texts, and erases or crosses out most of the original text in an attempt to find something unexpected and alive. He also erases image, and creates collage out of images in new texts. You can find a more detailed explanation, with examples, on his website.
This week, your prompt is to take a discarded piece of your own work, something you didn’t like or use for whatever reason, and practice erasure to salvage something pleasing or worthwhile or new. Here’s an example, using the opening paragraph of a story I never did anything with:
- Billy liked to watch the rainbow puddles form on the cracked slopes of the garage floor. So many cars dripped oil through here, and puddles formed, swirling with color when the temperature rose above freezing. It was almost spring, so he didn't need the heat on inside the booth anymore. In the winter, he sometimes slipped off his boots and rubbed his woolen feet over the small heater's scalding surface. But now it was warmer out, almost spring. The metal box remained on the floor, and once summer came, he'd flip a switch and turn it into a fan. It was off today, though.
-
Billy liked rainbow puddles on cracked swirling color. Freezing inside the booth. In the winter, boots rubbed the scalding surface. Once summer, turn today.
So I’m pretty sure I need to keep going - playing with these erasures - but that’s an interesting start to something different. Maybe a poem, or maybe a new way to present Billy’s world, by erasing some extraneous words to turn the paragraph on its side and see it differently.
Good luck with this exercise and please listen next week for another.
Music credits: 1) "Dreaming 1″ - John Fink; 2) "Filter" - Dorset Greens (a former Vermont band featuring several South Burlington High School graduates).
Read Full Post »
Vermont author Kathryn Guare, whose novel, Deceptive Cadence: The Virtuosic Spy, Book I, came out in April.
Today's Write The Book Prompt was suggested by my guest, Kathryn Guare. When she's out in the world, just going about her life, she will sometimes be inspired to consider how her characters might experience a certain moment in time. So, for example, if Conor were at the farmer's market and interacting with this a particular farmer or cheese maker or artist, how might he speak to that person? This week, keep your characters in mind as you go about your non-writing day. How would they speak and behave and react to others, if they were navigating through your world?
Good luck with this exercise and please listen next week for another.
Music credits: 1) "Dreaming 1″ - John Fink; 2) "Filter" - Dorset Greens (a former Vermont band featuring several South Burlington High School graduates).
Read Full Post »
Posted in Writing, Publishing, Fiction, Poetry, Politics, Playwriting, Religion, Addiction, Memoir, Writing Craft, Essays, Family, Parenting, Vermont, Grandparents, Babies on Apr 25th, 2013 Comments
Best-selling author of fiction, essays and memoir, Anne Lamott. We discussed Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son.
Following the interview with Anne Lamott, a partial rebroadcast from 2008, with the poet David Budbill.
As we continue to enjoy National Poetry Month, this week's Write The Book Prompt is another poetry exercise. It's inspired by the work of my first guest, Anne Lamott, whose book, Some Assembly Required, has to do with becoming a grandparent. So this week, write a poem about grandparents. Being a grandparent, having a grandparent, or whatever else this prompt might inspire for you.
Good luck with this exercise and please listen next week for another.
Music credits: 1) "Dreaming 1″ - John Fink; 2) "Filter" - Dorset Greens (a former Vermont band featuring several South Burlington High School graduates).
Read Full Post »
Posted in Writing, Fiction, Book Selling, Mysteries, Novels, Self-publishing, History, Research, Writing Craft, Vermont on Apr 16th, 2013 Comments
Interview with R. A. Harold, author of Heron Island, a Vermont mystery. Recorded in front of an audience at the South Burlington Community Library last week.
Looking for ways to enjoy National Poetry Month? Check out these Vermont resources:
As we continue to enjoy National Poetry Month, this week's Write The Book Prompt is a poetry exercise. Consider these three ways to approach writing a poem:
- First, try flipping through a newspaper and see if any ideas come to you. Don't focus hard on FINDING a subject, just skim the paper and let your mind wander.
- Second, possibly write about a childhood experience that has stayed with you.
- And third, you could try either writing about a negative experience that you shared with a good friend, or a positive moment shared with an enemy or someone with whom you normally don't get along.
No matter what you choose to write about, be sure to include specific imagery and detail, and keep the five senses in mind. When you decide what to write about, write your first notes or first draft rapidly, without censoring yourself. Don't worry about structure, rhyme or grammar. Just get words on paper and see where the process takes you.
Good luck with this exercise and please listen next week for another.
Music credits: 1) "Dreaming 1″ - John Fink; 2) "Filter" - Dorset Greens (a former Vermont band featuring several South Burlington High School graduates).
Read Full Post »
Australian novelist Poppy Gee, author of Bay of Fires, published by Reagan Arthur, an imprint of Little Brown.
Today I have two Write The Book Prompts to offer, both suggested by my guest, Poppy Gee. The first is to use the sense of smell in your work. If you write fiction, introduce a smell that can make your character think about or notice something specific. Poppy's second suggestion for a fiction writer who is stuck is to write four statements about your character in scene: the first three should be statements of action, and the fourth should be an emotional statement. So for example:
Helen walked the long way to work. She turned her ankle in the second block. Her ankle was really throbbing by the time she arrived. She wondered if she might have sprained it and worried it would be impossible to walk back home later.
Poppy says that, despite their simplicity, writing very basic statements like this will often ground her in scene and help her get started.
Good luck with these exercises and please listen next week for another.
Music credits: 1) "Dreaming 1″ - John Fink; 2) "Filter" - Dorset Greens (a former Vermont band featuring several South Burlington High School graduates).
Read Full Post »
This week's show has two parts. First, an interview with Mohsin Hamid, author of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, published by Riverhead. And then a smorgasbord of interviews with journal editors with whom I spoke at the AWP Conference in Boston. I asked what they were looking for in submissions, or what news they had to share with writers. These are the journals whose booths I visited. You can visit their websites by clicking on any one: Hunger Mountain, Redivider, Agni, Hotel Amerika, Columbia Poetry Review, Story South, Cave Wall, Ninth Letter, The Mom Egg, Adanna Literary Journal, Sonora Review, Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, Mid-American Review, Rathalla Review, Philadelphia Stories, Ploughshares, The Sun, Green Mountains Review, Memorious, New England Review, Florida Review, Barnstorm Literary Journal, The Cincinnati Review, The Baltimore Review, The Saint Ann's Review, iO, Triquarterly, The Missouri Review, and Upstreet.
Today's Write The Book Prompt is to write a story, poem, or essay in the second person.
Good luck with this exercise and please listen next week for another.
Read Full Post »
Posted in Writing, Politics, writing retreats, Activism, Creative Nonfiction, Nonfiction, Environment, Nature, Memoir, Writing Craft, Essays on Mar 12th, 2013 Comments
An interview from the archives with Scott Russell Sanders, author of twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including A Conservationist Manifesto and Earth Works, his latest, published in 2012 by Indiana University Press. This show originally ran in two parts, but here is available as a single podcast lasting almost an hour and a half.
Today's Write The Book Prompt is inspired by a writing conference I went to at the end of last week and over the weekend: AWP 2013, which took place in Boston. AWP stands for Associated Writing Programs. In the time I've been going to the meeting, every couple years for the past ten years or so, attendance has exploded. This year they had some 11,000 writers show up. That's a lot of writers, and they need a LOT of space. So there's crowd control to think about, and which panels and workshops and readings are of most interest to you, social concerns, like What-again-is-the-name-of-that-guy-who's-walking-over-here-and-where-do-I-know-him-from? There will be dietary concerns, like do you have time to stand in that long line for a cup of coffee and a cookie, and if you do, will you not be able to get a seat in the How-I-got-my-book- reviewed-by-Oprah panel? There's the issue of having to sit for long periods of time on maybe not the most comfortable seats. But then there are the great things: seeing old friends, learning new things, returning home energized to write! So this week's prompt is to write a poem, a story, an essay or a personal narrative about some experience you've either had or can imagine having at a conference. It can be any kind of conference or meeting or reunion - whatever inspires you to write.
Good luck with this exercise and please listen next week for another.
Read Full Post »
Posted in Writing, Publishing, Fiction, Science Fiction, Novels, Religion, Short Stories, Research, Writing Craft, Structure on Mar 5th, 2013 Comments
Short story writer and novelist Moira Crone, whose latest book is The Not Yet, published by University of New Orleans Press and one of seven on the ballot for the Philip K. Dick Award - Best Paperback Original Science Fiction Novel of the Year (winner to be announced in late March 2013).
Click here to see artwork inspired by The Not Yet.
Today I have several Write The Book Prompts to offer, suggested by my guest, Moira Crone.
Conventional Fiction Prompts:
After he stopped her from jumping ...
I remember ...
I will never forget ...
Speculative Fiction Prompts:
Since there was no more religion, he decided to ...
Once the sky had smashed into smithereens, she ...
She read his arm to see where he was headed ...
Good luck with these exercises and please listen next week for another.
Music credits: 1) "Dreaming 1″ - John Fink; 2) "Filter" - Dorset Greens (a former Vermont band featuring several South Burlington High School graduates).
Read Full Post »
Standard Podcasts [00:59:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (Loading)
