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Writers and Writing

I hate giving gifts. But …

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Here is the thing. Our book Finishing School: The Happy Ending to That Writing Project You Can’t Seem to Get Done makes a great gift. I propose it as the solution to all gift-giving problems. And I have somewhat reliable proof, based on real people saying real things without prompting or cash prizes. When we talked about this idea, Danelle and I, when we wrote the proposal and showed it to...

I, too, dislike “craft”

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I just read this Alif Batuman piece in n+1 from a few years back in which I found a kinship reading of “craft.” So let me get something off my chest, counterproductive and humiliating as it may be: Craft is awful. I hate craft!Instead of standing out there in the hot sun polishing and polishing your doomed anachronistic prose beauty why not instead, today! unleash the wild craftless being within...

Ha ha I make myself laugh!

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I was having so much fun reading over my fictional interview with Wolf Blitzer about how we don’t really know for certain that Phoenicians and Mesopotamians didn’t settle the Sacramento Delta, do we, Wolf? I dunno, it might sound stupid, but my character uses all those specious arguments you see idiots use on other idiots on political talk shows and for me it was really funny. So that...

Working on the novel in Italy on Thanksgiving Day

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Hi. So here it is Day 3 of my 49-day project to finish this novel using the Finishing School method and talk about it as I do so. Today, what I am editing is a long solo performance by the main character in which she gives a rambling monologue that makes her sound faintly deranged, and then dumps the contents of two bags on stage, one an expensive Gucci bag and the other a cheap Safeway bag, and...

Writing and the restless mind

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As I sit here (“As I sit here”? “As I sit here”! “As I sit here” is one of the worst, most clichéd and overused beginnings in the history of first-person narrative … and yet … it is germane, as I am indeed sitting here!  So …) as I was saying, as I sit here on the floor in my little room in this little medieval hill town of Castiglion...

Will our words ever be heard again?

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We write and we write and we write on the Net, dispensing thoughts and advice. For what?  Cary’s classic column from  WEDNESDAY, FEB 4, 2009 Dear Cary, My problem is that we have a one-day cycle in our writing, in our lives. You read our problems; then people read our problems in your column. Then people read our responses, but then the sun comes up again, and all our writing goes down on the...

Letter to a friend, with a poem at the end

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Dear … I thought of you just now. I am sitting in this renovated 13th-century Italian convent between Rome and Florence, a short walk up from the train station, and your face  drifted into view. There were a lot of people here for ten days but they all left on the train today. I suppose suddenly being alone was one reason I thought of you. There had been little time to really think. Now I am...

On not taking pictures of extravagantly beautiful things, or Florence: Day 3

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Is it the restraint of love? Is it reverence? Amid the effervescent joy of buildings that look like music; the muscular formality of a 50-foot-high gate on an ancient wall; the fleeting intoxication of wafting jasmine: Why, exactly, amid these things, do I feel the contrary impulses to stop and snap an iPhoto yet  not snap an iPhoto? It’s reverence is what it is, no? Reverential surrender...

In Florence. Italianate facades. Espresso on Magenta and Corso Italia and a boy with a harmonica

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Kids are beautiful in cities. They ain’t been ground up yet. There’s harmonicas. After grueling San Francisco-Paris-Florence flight we ride the tiny Pensione Crocini elevator to the tall windows on the courtyard, wash, nap, then espresso at the cafe and luxuriating in the beautiful visual rhythm of the Italianate style, the beautiful rhythm of spring on the Arno, which is rushing past...

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