We’re starting a new feature next week called The Writing Clinic. You’re invited to send in any problems you’re having with your writing, general or specific, and we’ll do our best to answer them, or at least open them up for discussion. You can send your questions/problems by clicking on the comment button below (you don’t have to use your real name) or by sending us an e-mail at StuartandCharlotte@yahoo.com. (To continue reading, click on the title above.)
Writing Advice
a picture’s worth…
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 1 Comment
My father always lined us up by the car on holidays to photograph us; my brother looking bored, me smirking, and my mother just trying to make the best of it. I have dozens of these photographs. My brother and I always complained about having to pose for them, but whenever my father took us up on our advice for candid pictures there I was caught with my mouth wide open, my eyes closed or looking oddly furtive.
What photographs do you have on your desk right now? Or on the wall or on your dresser or in albums or on your computer? What do they say about you and the people you love?
Writers are crazy about photographs, both in fiction and in memoir. They can lend a kind of shorthand to events. Anne Tyler in her 1980 novel Morgan’s Passing writes of a family photograph album with 15 pages devoted to the babyhood of the first of seven daughters…(to continue reading, click on the title above)
Writing Advice
quotes: a picture is worth …
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 1 Comment
There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.
– Ansel Adams
A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
– Eudora Welty
I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don’t find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges.
– William Albert Allard, “The Photographic Essay”
The Writing Life
blog block
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 0 Comments
It’s kind of like writer’s block. After teaching one class, two workshops, preparing a third workshop and getting a final draft of my writing book off to the publisher this week, I’m sick to death of the sound of my own voice – in a class or on the page. I have blog block. The Sunday deadline for this post looms up and I’m wondering what to write about. I started with that nineteen year old Harvard student who got a half million dollar book deal and is accused of plagiarism, but after spending so much energy a few months ago being mad at James Frey, I just couldn’t get into it. (Click on the title to continue reading …)
Writing Advice
quotes of the week: writer’s block
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 3 Comments
“Every writer I know had trouble writing.” – Joseph Heller
“There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.” – Joan Didion
“You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.” – Gustave Flaubert
The Writing Life
team teaching storytelling
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 4 Comments
For hours last week I worked on my half of the workshop that Billy Mernit and I taught Saturday at UCLA Extension about core elements of storytelling in film and fiction. We’d had at least five long meetings about it, a zillion emails back and forth, and lots of:
What were we thinking of? This is way too much work. This is a huge project. This is about a hundred quotes from novels and God knows how many film clips, and it’s really a ten week course at the very least and how are we going to teach it in six hours etc. etc.
On Saturday morning over 50 students showed up for the workshop and Billy and I began the intricate dance of team teaching two different genres of storytelling. (To continue reading, click on the title above.)
Writing Advice
quote of the week: fiction into film
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 0 Comments
“I was not prepared for the emotional hammering I got when I saw [the film]….It is an eerie sensation to see events you have imagined in the privacy of your mind, and tried helplessly to transmit to others through little black marks on a page, loom up before you in an overwhelming visual experience.”
– Annie Proulx
Fooling Around with Poems
poetry month
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 4 Comments
If you didn’t hear Scott Simon interview Edward Hirsch on NPR about poetry on Saturday, April 8th, here is your chance. Hirsch, with great clarity and simplicity, explains what’s important about poetry and reads a couple of knock-out poems. Click on the NPR link above and be inspired. The thing about poetry is that you…
Writing Advice
quote of the week: poetry
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 0 Comments
“Poetry began when somebody walked off a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, “Ah-h-h!” That was the first poem.”
– Lucille Clifton
teaching writing
guilty pleasures
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 3 Comments
The Edward R. Hamilton Super Bargain Book catalog (“All Items in This Catalog Are $3.95 or Less!”) just arrived in the mail. My heart pounds, I start going through it checking books to order. I have a lot to do today, new courses to work on, editing a new book, etc. Plus I have no more space in any of the bookcases which now cover most of the walls in my house. But like a true addict I rationalize my behavior. Next week is my birthday … to read the rest of the post, click on the title
Writing Advice
quote of the week
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 0 Comments
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.” Stephen King
Writing Your Own History
unbogging the past
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 3 Comments
Let’s say that you want to write your entire life story, and you want to start with memories of your grandmother telling you about growing up in Andorra, moving to Paris, coming to this country where she met your grandfather on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. (And this is just your maternal grandmother.) You also want to include what your paternal grandparents told you about living in Vermont during the Depression, the biggest snowstorm that ever hit St. Johnsbury, and the history of that farm table handed down to you etc. And you’re not even up to your parents let alone the beginning of your own journey on this earth. There’s just so much material if you’re over the age of thirty and it compounds as the years fly by. The sheer weight of all this material can bog you down before you even begin. What to do? Check out what Jean Franks did below.
