Welcome to the inaugural post of my new website! On the cusp of Trump’s ‘accession’ all aspects of life have come to feel different. Not an hour goes by when I don’t think about how things will be in a month, how things have already changed, how...
Weather Woman
Weather Woman is the story of meteorologist Bronwyn Artair who discovers she has the power to change the weather. Feeling out of place in her doctoral program in Atmospheric Sciences at MIT, 30-year-old Bronwyn drops out and takes a job as a TV...
Writer as Citizen: Good or Bad?
My partner and I recently went to the coast for a long weekend of writing. He was working on a new play. I was working on a new novel. Both of us are hoping to finish these projects by the year’s end, and we’re both feeling driven. We...
Naked on the Page
I’ve been thinking about actors of late, since my partner recently acted in August: Osage County (the terrific play by Tracy Letts). I have often felt relieved that I am a writer and not an actor. Actors must expose themselves so ruthlessly, it...
Novels and The Inner Life
The quote below from Richard Bausch, which appeared yesterday on Facebook, has really spoken to me. Novels are an avenue into the interior life of human beings, their private ways of thinking and seeing. No other art penetrates inner lives in...
Can A Writer (any writer) Stop Writing?
Most writers have, at some point along the way, wished the compulsion to write would go away. Writing frequently keeps us from seeing friends, from exercising as much as we’d like to, from creating beautiful gardens and cooking gourmet meals and...
Who Are You Out There?—An Invitation to Writers and Readers
I have been blogging for three years now, since May of 2010, just after I returned from a trip to Zimbabwe. When I began I was quite sporadic, and there was almost a full year when I hardly posted anything. At the outset I had a very vague idea...
Writers Saying No, Carving Out Time, and Venturing (Occasionally) from the Cave
Last weekend on a panel at a writer’s conference in Eugene, Karen Karbo, a terrifically funny writer and person, recommended that writers examine “the number of things we do that don’t need to be done.” The laundry and dishes don’t need to be...
Why We Write…
The following quote from Jose Rivera about writing plays could be said about any kind of writing: “You write because you want to show something. For instance, you write ‘to show that the world is shit.’ ‘To show how fleeting love and happiness...
Is a Novel a Story?
In the last couple of years, since I’ve been teaching screenwriting, I’ve been thinking obsessively about story design. Writing a good film is all about creating an airtight story that has the feeling of inevitability and delivers...