Ly LO CONG
THE sky would always be this shade of blue. The towers had come down the day before. Third Avenue on the Upper East Side was a flutter of missing faces, the posters taped to the mailboxes, plastered on windows, flapping against the light poles: “Looking for Derek Sword”; “Have You Seen This Person?”; “Matt…
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How has the passion of our calling been robbed from us? The crisis of our age is that people are living in stunned submission to the political circumstance of the times. We are being bought off by our comforts. At the same time social outrages are unfolding at our feet. But never forget that writing…
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Happy families are all alike, said Tolstoy, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. So ask yourself these questions: Are you making your characters too nice? Are they too sincere? Have you given them enough rough edges? Have you “flawed” them up? Our characters have to have fingerprints. Don’t be afraid to…
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This sounds inane, but do you really know who is telling your story? And do you know why they want to tell it? And do you know where they’re telling it from? And do you know when, in terms of time, they are telling the story? And do you know exactly what happened? And do…
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Now that you have rushed back, you should write your work as if you are sending it to your reader one careful sentence at a time. Prose should be as well-written as poetry. Every word matters. You must test for the rhythm and precision. Look for assonance, alliteration, rhyme. Look for internal echoes. Vary your…
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Every now and then, take a break. Go on holiday. Learn how to like writing again. Miss it for a week. And then rush back to it.
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A couple of years ago a 57-year-old in Hancock Michigan was searching through the attic of his family home, when he opened a box and a dusty copy of a book called “Prince of Egypt” fell out. He flicked to the back cover and discovered that it was a library book forty-seven years overdue. Over the years, the book had been misplaced and boxed and re-boxed and misplaced again.
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Every work of fiction is organised somehow – and the best of them are more profoundly organised than they let on. Chapter, book, verse. There is method in the story-telling madness. Our stories rely on the human instinct for architecture. Structure is, essentially, a container for content. Think of it as a shape into which your…
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Sit down and write yourself a credo. What is it that you believe in? What is that you want to do with your writing? Who is it that you want to speak to? What is your relationship with language? Try this at different times of your career. Maybe even try for a credo every year,…
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Find your life – beyond your writing life – worth living. Be in the habit of hoping. Allow yourself a little joy, even in the face of the world’s available evidence. In fact, create the evidence everywhere and anywhere you can.
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