(This post continues my series of posts in which I experiment with "public writing." To view more posts on this topic, use the "Topics" dropdown menu above and select "Experiment in Public Writing." Thanks, Ed) I'm thinking about the following line: "... the manganese reek of an aluminum casting works that drained down through the…
Updated Yesterday, I wrote about the elusive source of my ideas, then followed up with a second post introducing an opening line that came to me from who knows where. "And from that line come other lines," I wrote. "If there are enough lines, I discover a voice and a work of short fiction." Today,…
Two craft notes in one day--a record. Asked where my ideas come from, I shrug, "I don't know." Asked whether I start with plot, or a character, or a setting, or a description, I usually respond, "None of the above." What comes to me first is a line, a sentence. And from that line come…
Sometimes word games like this can inspire interesting combinations or turns of phrase. Here are ten off-the-cuff suggestions: aerating tool for a very patient gardener tossing caber for Edinborough Barbie ceremonial scepter for the mayor of an eponymous town in upstate New York impromptu mustache when balanced on curled upper lip baton for a diminutive…
A Quiet De Luxe, it is, banged together by a worker preoccupied with discovering the subconscious mechanism by virtue of which his recurring nightmare of The Battle of the Bulge accommodated the delicate gesture made every day by the newspaper guy he passed on Farmington Avenue, a beseeching and weary opening of the hand that…
