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December 7, 2013

I love this part the most

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After the Saturday workshop I settle on the couch reading The Maverick Poets, that book edited by Steve Kowit, who I was lodging next to down at the Sun Esalen thing. But the thing I love after the workshop is that feeling afterwards like we’ve all been together in this room dreaming out loud together. So then I read that poem by Bukowski about the cat, “The History of a Tough...

Four good books about writing

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Books I checked out of the library and read and enjoyed in 2013: Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story. Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story. Rober Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream. and Patricia Highsmith’s Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. Kind of an end-of-the-year thing. I read lots more books than that, but these stood out. (The below is verbatim from my San...

Writing a novel without knowing how: Notes from my voluminous Burning the Rain Girl files

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To begin without knowing how to do it: That has been my approach, and I have agonized like a man sitting in a field with many ingredients of a house laid out before him and a panicked feeling that he has begun before he is ready. He has begun without a plan. He has no blueprint. He simply got it into his head that he could dredge up many interesting things from the well and the lake and the river...

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