The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling

“Poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions . . . It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar is in chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder

Every Alpha Narrative I know about offers a strong example of what John Barth calls the “ground situation,” a fictional premise where something interesting and important is at stake, a premise so rich it will take the writer a whole book to fully unpack and explore all its multileveled dimensions.

But today my study is, obviously, a projection or externalization of my own mind and spirit: a cluttered catastrophe of books, creative tools, memorabilia, and images where I always feel most at home.

Emotion has become sound.

Percy Shelley in “A Defense of Poetry,”

Using the notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Albert Camus as examples, I ask them to maintain a writer’s workbook, one they are to fill daily with images, ideas, scraps of language, character sketches, overheard dialogue, and so forth, that they can use when revising their fiction.

One of the most famous quotes we have from Karl Marx is “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

a culture can be measured by the performance of those who speak and write its language. If that thesis is credible, then perhaps we should be worried by the coarseness, vulgarity, and at times obscenity that we encounter so often today in American speech. Something I’ve never forgotten about the community I grew up in is that I never heard adults s

In his syndicated column (February 6, 2011) “No Clue Where We’re Going,” Leonard Pitts, Jr., marvels at the transformations in our lives since 1860, then 1961. “The point being, we have experienced—are experiencing—greater change at a faster pace than ever before,” he wrote. “But as a fish in water doesn’t know it’s wet, we, living through this cha