Category: My Questionable Point of View

I heard a snippet of an interview with Robert Goorlick on NPR while driving in the car. I heard a portion where Goorlick began to lament how contemporary literary fiction is too cerebral and then started to wax poetic about the physicality of his novel, Reliable Wife. You can listen to the audio by clicking here

His comment about physicality immediately put me on the defensive. He makes a fair enough point, I suppose. I …

The Difference Between Creative Writing and Technical Writing – Le Pigeon

What do you think a pigeon would taste like? Would it be dark meat or white meat? Do they fly as much as ducks or geese? That would mean dark meat. Do they mostly walk around on sidewalks and window ledges? Then perhaps some white meat.

The stereotype of the starving artist has discouraged many potential fiction writers. In a biography about the science …

When Vladimir Nabokov was asked whether he had read Franz Kafka’s The Trial before writing Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov insisted that he had not. Having read Invitation to a Beheading, the basic premise is so similar—a man awaits execution for a crime that is never made clear—it is difficult to take his word for it. It doesn’t help that Lolita may have been intentionally or subconsciously plagiarized from a short story.

If I hadn’t …

The Italo Calvino novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler, opened me up to a completely different type of story-telling. First, the story is written in the second person point of view. You know the second person, that point of view you are warned not even to try, because it is nearly impossible to make it work, but every writer at some point tries anyway. Well, Calvino pulls it off. How?

The knock against …

I have read stories that have started off rather badly in my opinion with an extended physical description of the main character. In some cases, every new character is introduced with an extended physical description. Of course, these descriptions include a distinguishing trait, because somewhere someone said that would make the character more believable

I have found quite the opposite to be true, where the distinguishing trait more often results in a crazy character circus …

While most of the rejections I ever received were of the form letter variety (“not at this time” or “does not fit our current needs”), I did get two that encouraged me to keep trying, perhaps for longer than was good for me.

Rejection #1

The first rejection was for a story that I had written and revised in my first writing workshop while I was pursuing a BA. It included an encouraging note with …