Which is what telling stories is, if you think about it – attempting to leave behind something that wasn’t there before. Arranging words in the order in which they belong, even before you knew that these words, in this order, existed.
Category: Writing Life
Our Writing Life column archive, which features an array of guest contributors.
The Writing Life: Show and Tell by Lisa Ahn
Show and tell is theater. As writers, we can’t help but love it. Like children, we harbor indeterminate, odd wonders. The idea that slips inside a pocket. The fringe of inspiration. We collect words like talismans – tessellation, shambolic, caducity – and cup them in our palms.
The Writing Life: Writing on the Edge of Crazyville by Lisa Ahn
After I finished my first novel, I had several lengthy, insightful conversations with Oprah Winfrey. Our dialogue was the stuff of legends – and it took place entirely in my head.
The Writing Life: In Progress by William Henderson
Blame what you will: Changing seasons, the start of the school year for my son, an influx of income-generating writing projects, but several projects I impulsively began over the summer remain in the In-Progress folder on my computer desktop.
The Writer’s Life: The Second Person by Michael Suppa
You’re seated at a large table with a delegation of professors and several classmates. The smell of old books, of the once finely polished furniture, and the faded tapestry rug tinges your nose. You wonder why they would choose such a poorly lit room to have you read in…
The Writing Life: The Basis for Everything Else by William Henderson
At a playground near my apartment in Boston, my children on side-by-side swings, their mother, my ex-wife, pushing our daughter while our son pumps his legs until he is higher than he intended. He asks for help slowing down, then stopping. I catch his legs and hold him steady. He laughs. Let go, he tells…
The Writing Life: Generations by Lisa Ahn
I was raised on magic. My father always had a book at hand. I grew up with words as close as blankets, as nutritious as carrots or spinach or milk. They were necessary things, inviolate.
The Writing Life: An Open Letter to My Muse by Hilary Meyerson
As a writer, I often get the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” I also hear it often at book readings when they open up the floor to questions. I love watching other, more famous writers, grind their teeth as they struggle to answer.
The Writing Life: Writing About It by Michael Suppa
It’s the first moment of normalcy in the last four and a half months. Then, I glance at her walker, the portable table, the flowered box holding a mass of medication, and the moment is gone. I’m back at the hospital.
The Writing Life: Writing from the Sidelines by Lisa Ahn
I finished my first novel when I was forty years old and the shock of it, the rifting amazement, nearly carried me away. The pages hadn’t begun as a Book. I hadn’t intended to be a Writer.
