Though born and raised in the United States, I recently found myself asking whether I'm an American writer. I concluded that, based on my approach to fiction and despite having been born here, I am absolutely not an American writer. American writers, with few exceptions, believe you need to get to the point. I'm not…
Craft Note: Embracing the Morning
For most of my adult life, and a lot of my youth, I've been a night owl. As a kid, I loved staying up on Friday and Saturday nights to catch Chiller Theater or The Ghoul. Then came "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert" and "Midnight Special" and "Saturday Night Live." Later, my punk rock inclination and…
Craft Note: The Job
The job of the writer is to make the kind of expedition few are willing to undertake. Then, skillfully using all the tools of language at her disposal, she must file a complete report. With luck, both writer and reader will be the better for it, or they will at least have learned something interesting…
More on Typewriters: Auster’s “Reading With My Fingers”
I'm still on my summer hiatus for a few more weeks, but wanted to follow up on an earlier post about why I've abandoned writing on a computer and returned to the typewriter. In that post, I noted the word processing program on your computer is itself an impediment to productivity. How so? Ease of…
Craft Note: Serious Day Jobs and the Grave Dangers of the “Twinned” Existence
The Writer and Pynchon's Concept of "Twinning" So, here I find myself arrived at that stage of life in which the passing of the sands through the hourglass has evolved beyond hoary metaphor into palpable reminder of my long sacrifice of calling to day job. I seem daily to grow more desperate and panicky over…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 