Craft Notes: A Prose Central Series By DeWitt Henry, Prose Editor I evolved shoptalk or notebook sheets during my teaching of fiction workshops, which proved helpful to me and to students. I asked them to ask themselves about character, plot, setting, dialogue, sensory imagery, sentimentality, translation, simultaneous actions and other aspects of craft. But foremost…
Tag: on writing
Strategic Clutter and Decoys
And Other Fictional Strategies By WTP Writer Richard Wertime Richard Wertime reflects on the Crafting of his story “Soccer,” published in WTP Vol. IX #3 “Setting in fiction ought always veer toward metonymy.” —Novelist Richard Bausch In my short story, “Soccer,” published in April’s WTP, a mid-life father joins his teen son, Kevin, in an…
Writing for the Long Haul
Creative Longevity as a Desire for the Unobtainable By Ronald J. Pelias, WTP Guest Writer With a wrinkled wave of years washing over me, I wonder why I am still trying to create, still trying to make words do what I would like them to do. You’d think that after all these years of effort…
On Aphorisms
From Richard Kostalanetz’s A Writer’s Torah A Selection by DeWitt Henry, WTP Prose Editor Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz’s work in several fields appear in various editions of Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Webster’s Dictionary of American Writers, The HarperCollins Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature,…
Reflections by Tillie Olsen
“I’ve never had, except once, that happy time when something writes itself…” Transcribed by DeWitt Henry, Prose Editor These reflections were from a recording of Tillie Olsen’s reading at Emerson College, MA, March 23, 1974. I first read Tillie Olsen as part of editing Ploughshares in the 1970s. Sam Lawrence, whom I had contacted as…
The Story Teller and the Telling
“Story is you and me. Story connects us to each other and to the world.” By Ruth Knafo Setton, WTP Guest Writer Every night for the past thousand years, under moon and stars in the Djma el Fnaa, the fabled square of Marrakech, a man tells a story. Wearing a white turban and djellabah, he…
STRIKE THE EMPTY by Beth Kephart
Beth Kephart’s new book on memoir extends her ongoing conversation By Richard Gilbert, WTP Contributing Editor STRIKE THE EMPTY: NOTES FOR READERS, WRITERS, AND TEACHERS OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart (Juncture Workshops, 2019). 185 pp, $12.00. Let’s start with the title, a very good place to start—bemused, as you are, by what “The Empty” is…
Book Review: Inventing the World
On the Craft of Writing, for All Levels By DeWitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor INVENTING THE WORLD: THE FICTION WRITER’S GUIDEBOOK TO CRAFT AND PROCESS by Jack Smith (Serving House Books, 2018). 285pp, $15.95. Jack Smith’s essays on “the craft and process” of writing fiction have appeared since 2010 in either The Writer or in…
On Fact and Fiction
Finding Truth in Fiction By DeWitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor In the late 1960s, I believed in pure fiction, and as a writer set out to imagine and portray the inner life of working-class characters in my father’s candy factory. I also kept a writer’s notebook on the side, where I vented and mulled about…
Explicating the Poetic Process
“My writing process saves a fair percentage of time for self-doubt and lack of artistic confidence.” By Amy Nawrocki, WTP Guest Writer It starts with an encounter. There is a notarized mammal, a dead serpent, and a preserved misspelling. Then a mythical flash of inspiration, the grabbing for tool and template, and the clumsy yet…
A Hundred Rejection Letters
“For every piece that is rejected, at least one other person has read it, thought about it…” By Chris Brauer, WTP Guest Writer I read somewhere that, as a writer, I should aim for a hundred rejection letters a year. The theory is that if one submits a flood of work onto the world—enough to…
Book Review: The Hidden Machinery
Ore in Every Rift of Livesey’s Apologia and Guide By Dewitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor THE HIDDEN MACHINERY: ESSAYS ON WRITING by Margot Livesey (Tin House Books, 2017). 301pp, paper, $15.95. MFA programs are descendants of the “how to be a successful writer” handbooks in the 1890s (see “Handbooks and Workshops” in Andrew Levy’s 1993…