One dictum I coined to keep my writing on track is this: Do things in prose the Hollywood machine cannot reproduce. For me, this means exploring characters, and even objects and other phenomena, from the inside out. It's writing that trades the forward momentum of plot for the deep dive into character or situation. It's…
This week I've been busy cutting, honing, and polishing a chapter of Housebreaking the Muse. The editor of a well-regarded literary and arts journal has kindly agreed to have a look, so naturally I want to put my best work forward. The process has once again reminded me of my attitudes about fiction, which are…
309 Days Remaining ... This post reports my recent progress on Housebreaking the Muse and describes some major reworking to the novel's opening section. Several weeks ago, I began to realize the opening section of the novel was just too disjointed. Because of the many narrative entities and the multiple universal planes at work in…
This experiment arose from a Craft Note post I published last week, titled How Things Begin, in which I described how my work arises from a single line, to which I append more lines. To demonstrate the process, and as something of a challenge to myself, I'm attempting to write a story "in public." What…
Here are some new, rough lines to add to the last. Not sure if I'll be adding more daily, but I'll use the above title format to indicate further developments. Ed. [updated 12/6/11] It occurred to him the sophisticated code on top of which everything runs included a randomizer and so the possibility of orderly,…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 