The Method The Amherst Writers and Artists Philosophy Workshop Events Calendar, in-person, online, worldwide Find a workshop in your area Pat Schneider, founder of AWA Pat Schneider on Wikipedia Pat Schneider bio on the Poetry Foundation website A really good poem: Pat’s “Instructions for the Journey” Pat Schneider: “We send the children of the poor to fight the children of the poor.” (In...
Hey there! Curious about the writing workshops? You can join at any time by clicking on the lovely picture of me below: [email protected] email write “Workshops” in the subject line. WhatsApp is better: +39 334 725 8715. Maybe try the U.S. number: 415 340-9108. The best time to call me from America is when you wake up in the morning. Because I live in Italy. The background: I...
I’m available to a limited number of clients for editing, coaching and advising on long writing projects. Contact me at [email protected] if you have a project you are working on and would like to talk about it. What I do: It might be nothing more than a couple of hours talking through a project. Or I might follow a long writing project, reading rough drafts as they are completed and...
I have learned a lot in the last seven years about caring for the writing self and the creative soul. Some of the things I have learned have helped other people, too. Doing the Amherst Writers and Artists method has become a way of life. Many people I have met while doing this have become dear friends whose occasional appearances are now cherished events in the week. The role of teacher is one I...
Dear Cary, I’m writing a book based on my day job where I have access to all kinds of sensitive information. It is about the parallels between criminals and business people and I’ve named it, “Everything I Know About Entrepreneurs I Learned from Drug Dealers.” I’ve been privy to a lot of behind-the-scenes situations including going on ride-alongs with various federal...
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...
Here is how to make a magic book appear in someone’s hands. I write in a sometimes unstructured and intuitive way. I tend to hear the words I write. I don’t think it all out ahead of time. So I end up with events that happen in the novel but without explaining how and why they happened. For instance, I imagined a book, a fake book, a book not actually written by Mesopotamians five...
I have rewritten a certain scene several times. As a result, I now have several overlapping texts, texts that repeat other texts or portray the same events in different colors. Luckily, using Scrivener, I can go through this 3,000-word morass of visionary … OK, that’s the other problem: This scene combined the visible world, i.e. a woman who is sleepwalking, with the interior world...
One of the counter-intuitive aspects of finishing a novel turns out to be the desperate struggle not to have any new ideas. Or only new ideas in the service of problem-solving. Finishing is a closing-down, a limiting effort, bent on discarding, not on expanding. Yet sometimes, to finish a scene or section, one can be helped by a new idea. So here is an example of how the problem-solving aspect of...
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...
10) Rudely talk over her. 9) Ignore her and when she doesn’t go away keep ignoring her until nightfall. 8) Listen to her and look for possible kernels of truth in what she says. 7) Regard her with mute compassion as a split-off part of the self. 6) Get used to what she’s saying and tune her out like a bad radio. 5) Pause in your writing until she has had her full say and then continue...
Is it appropriate, in a work of autofiction, to ask, Which part is the fiction? I think it is. Because of how people read. The great thing about fiction is it frees the author of the ethical considerations of autobiography and memoir. When people read something that’s about something that actually happened they read one way. When they read about something that’s not supposed to have...
But writing in a magnificent French château surrounded by 300 acres of topiary, formal gardens, parks, woodland trails and vineyards can’t hurt. Maybe you’re perfectly content writing by yourself day after day in your kitchen on that old table, or at your cramped desk in the spare bedroom. Fine. À chacun son goût. You can find us this September at Le Château du Pin, a private French...
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...
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...
Here are some of the links I mentioned in the 2013 Santa Barbara Novel Mentor workshop, about dialog, pitches, queries and beginnings of novels. dialog Writing Dialog by Tom Chiarella. I lent this book to somebody and have to get it back. It’s a good book. Useful. Interesting. 12 Exercises for improving dialog by John Hewitt. Some of these are pretty good. You can’t go wrong trying...