12/04/15 – HATE REWRITING? GIVE IT TIME
Writing is rewriting. Like most writers, I do my best to apply this old adage, even though redrafting, revising, and “killing my darlings” often means a bruising battle with my ego. However, I recently discovered a pain-free way to rewrite: time. Time not only heals all wounds; it also anesthetizes the ego. (Continue Reading)
The Writer’s Responsibility
In this age of global terrorism, impending war and inevitable ecological catastrophe, does the literary writer have any political responsibility? As a young man, I detested politics and saw myself as an aesthete. I would have answered that the artist’s role was merely to create works of beauty. (Continue Reading)
11/13/15 On Memoirs and Writing
I’ve never been one for reading memoirs. Oh sure, biographies, or a now and again autobiography, but memoirs just seemed too sticky for me. I never wanted to know that one of my favorite movie stars hated wire hangers, and beat her daughter, or really anything of the dirty laundry that takes place in the confines of a family. But this year I stumbled into the rabbit hole of the memoir. (Continue Reading)
11/7/15 – VETERANS DAY READING: 11 GREAT WAR NOVELS FOR 11/11
There are many ways to honor the men and women who put on a uniform and risk it all for the nations that send them into war in the name of duty and patriotism. One obvious way is to put their stories in writing—fiction or nonfiction—so that others can read and remember the sacrifices they made. Among literature’s many intrinsic values is its ability to give readers a sense of what other people experience, to help us understand, empathize, and learn from the thing that others have done. (Continue Reading)
11/04/15 – WORDS TO WRITE BY
I knew a boy in high school who kept laminated copies of favorite quotations in his wallet. Impressed, I started collecting favorite quotes about writing and art and life myself, and pinned them near my desk as inspiration. I still have them. And, yeah, I realize I could just Google any and every quote on writing or anything else these days. But these are my own private curated collection, and before the paper yellows much more, I want to share a few words of wisdom I’ve kept at my side for a lifetime. (Continue Reading)
Coming up Nov. 1 – Guest Blogger Jen Michalski writes about the use of magical realism in fiction in her upcoming blog, “A Jolt of Vertigo.” Her fiction has always focused on domestic lives that ignite into disaster. Surprisingly, her first two novels rely heavily on magical realism. Jen Michalski is the author of the novels The Tide King and The Summer She Was Under Wa
ter, two collections of fiction, and a collection of novellas. Find her at jenmichalski.com. (Continue Reading)
Do You Know the First Thing About Writing Fiction? (It’s not craft!)
I’ve been thinking a great deal about how creative writing is taught in the US, about its strengths and weaknesses, and it seems to me that its great strength is that we teach craft very well, so well that there has probably never been a society that turns out so many competent, professional writers. As the Poetry Editor of a national magazine told me at AWP this year, most of the submissions he receives are technically accomplished—and yet very few of them are worth reading. Or as Robert Olen Butler describes his graduate students, they know nine of the ten things that fiction writers need to know very well—but they don’t know the first thing. (Continue Reading)
10/23/15 MENDACITY “Mendacity is a system that we live in,” declares Brick in Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot 
Tin Roof. “Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other.”
In Lucy Rosenthal’s novel, The World of Rae English, both liquor and suicide fail to kill Rae’s self delusions. Mendacity—habitual deviation from the truth—survives.
Rae English, the protagonist narrator, confesses this about her former husband: He’s on a book tour to promote his second book titled The Pitfalls of Deceit. Often he’s paired with John Dean. (Continue Reading)
10/20/15 NOVEL ENDINGS I don’t think this can be a spoiler because I can’t remember the name of the book or the author. It’s set in small-town Minnesota in the fall, and the protagonist teaches school. I liked it and sent it home with a friend who came for the weekend. He taught high school in New York City. The teaching year had just begun, and he was in his usual back-to-school funk. I thought he’d enjoy reading about a fellow high school teacher in a book set at the beginning of the academic year. “Thanks a lot,” he said sarcastically in our next phone conversation. (Continue Reading)
10/7/15 — Kids Write the Darndest Things
As a writer I love to read—first, for the joy of devouring a good book and, second, because as a writer I always learn something I can use. And as an aging baby boomer, I love to watch and try to mentor the youngest generation as it finds its footing in the world. That’s why I look forward each week to the 90 minutes I spend leading a teen writing club. It combines the best of both my worlds, and invariably I learn a lot—about life and about writing. (Continue Reading)
10/04/15 – DON QUIXOTE ON TAPE
My book club is reading Don Quixote – and they’re hating it. This is an erudite group. They have plowed their way through ponderous and elusive authors like Faulkner and Jane Austen. They’ve devoted long hours to devouring All the King’s Men and The Tale of Genji. But Don Quixote is killing the best of them. And I think I know why. They’re all listening to, not reading, the book. (Continue Reading)
10/1/15 — Women’s Fiction and Romance: Mutually Exclusive or Mutually Confusing?
Genres exist for a reason. Readers like to know what to expect, at least in general terms, when they pick out a book. And publishers want to accommodate them. As many budding writers learn during the querying process, the way they characterize a novel can be key to finding the right agent or publisher.
But what if a book doesn’t quite fit into one of the standard categories, or if it fits into too many? Or what if, to complicate matters even further, those categories aren’t all that different to begin with? (Continue Reading)
9/29/15 – Preview of October Guest Blogger Kelly Ann Jacobson
In today’s world of publishing, genre can be crucial. Readers use it to select new books and publishers use it to decide how to market and pitch new fiction. But what happens when a work of fiction crosses over? Of when it’s not easy to decide whether a novel is best described as, say, a romance or women’s fiction? That’s the topic that guest blogger Kelly Ann Jacobson will explore on Oct 1. Kelly is a fiction writer, poet, and lyricist who lives in Falls Church, Virginia. She received her MA in Fiction at Johns Hopkins University and is an Adjunct Professor of English. Kelly is the author of the novels Cairo in White and The Troublemakers, as well as several other books of poetry and prose. (Continue Reading)
9/26/15 – Tell, Don’t Show
Show, don’t tell is such an axiom of creative writing programs, and indeed of advice given to writers in general, that it is rarely questioned. The most recent author to visit the university program where I teach, for example, gave this advice to our students—and of course it’s sound, especially for the beginning writer, who is much more likely to err on the wrong side, of summary and exposition, including so few scenes that the writing remains dull. No less a master of fiction than Joseph Conrad said that the novelist’s task was to make the reader see, and who can doubt that that entails writing dramatic scenes most of the time? All the same, I have been pondering this question a good deal lately, and would like to share my reflections on why “show, don’t tell” has become such an unchallenged axiom—indeed an almost sacred Commandment—particularly in the United States, and what interesting alternatives to this strategy there might be. (Continue Reading)
9-23-15 YOUR TEST OF CHARACTER(S)
This is only a test—a test of characters. There’s only one question with multiple answers to chose from. I hope you’ll have to think about your answer before you read mine. The question: Can you name a novel that has only one character? Choose one answer from among the following:
1. Life of Pi by Yan Martel
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Dafoe
4. The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
5. Downtown by Ed McBain (Continue Reading)
9/17/2015 Stereotypes–Not So Believable Anymore
In my writers’ critique groups, someone’s draft characters or plot will sometimes be criticized as “unbelievable” or “unrealistic.” Sometimes that may be the writer’s ineptness, but since just about anything can happen on this planet, the criticism is more an expression of a lean toward assumptions and stereotypes.
Fifty years ago, a Harvard-educated African-American would be considered “unbelievable,” ditto a mountain-climbing woman or a marathon-running 100-year-old. Anyone who grew up in the fifties might remember how stereotypes were common and drove the plots in the movies (Continue Reading)
9/13/2015 A Dialogue on Historical Fiction
Three authors join me this month to discuss their thoughts on the genre of historical fiction. They are: Louise Colln, author of Woman of the Land: Mary, Mother of the Christ, and The Women of Rogers Street; George Spain, author of Lost Cove, Our People: Stories of the South, and The Last Giant, and Come Sit with Me…and Listen…; and John Neely Davis, author of The Sixth William, and Bear Shadow. (Continue Reading)
9/10/2015. THE PRIVATE AUTHOR—GOOD OR BAD?
Once upon a time authors were mysterious people, stereotyped as starving artists scratching with their pens or pecking on their typewriters in lonely garrets. William Shakespeare, for example, is a shadowy figure. We know about the times he lived in, but not a lot about him personally. The best insights we have about him lie in the words he wrote—his plays and poetry. Then came newspapers, radio, and television, and authors had the opportunity to reveal more of themselves to their readers. Today with the internet and social media, authors can share everything—in real time, even—if they want to. But as a reader, how much do you really want to know about the authors of the novels you read? (Continue Reading)
9/7/15 – Rachel Joyce, Harold Fry and Queenie Hennessey
Lately I’ve been reading a lot of sequels, and even a few prequels, because I’m working on a sequel of my own. I’ve also been reading a lot of books with older protagonists because my main character is in his seventies. So it was no surprise that I picked up Rachel Joyce’s The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, a follow-on to her enchanting best seller of 2012, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. The principal characters are the same and the new novel is in many ways another chapter of the story, but it is neither a prequel nor a sequel. It’s an “equel.” (Continue Reading)
8/23/15 WORDS OF POWER. Words are the struck notes of the writer’s composition. Consider: “It is all excessive, violent, and at the same time full of tenderness.” These words appear on page twenty-four of To Live Within. Excessive. Violent. Tenderness. The words resonate individually and as a powerful chord hinting at the essence of being alive in Lizelle Reymond’s 1969 memoir.
In a book published last year, Robin Black plucks a power cord. “I always wanted to be powerful. In this decade, finally, I look powerful. I feel powerful. And I feel alone.” The repetition of the word establishes strength before the counter melody intrudes in Life Drawing: A Novel. (Continue Reading)
8/17/2015 – The Scarpetta House
If you read best-selling author Patricia Cornwell’s forensic mysteries, you are familiar with her fictional character, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, medical examiner in Richmond, Virginia, and her tech-savvy niece Lucy and fellow investigator Pete Marino.
Cornwell sold her first Scarpetta novel, Postmortem, while working as a computer analyst at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. Postmortem would go on to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony, and Macavity awards as well as the French Prix du Roman d’Aventure prize – the first book ever to claim all these distinctions in a single year. To date, Cornwell’s books have sold some 100 million copies in 36 languages in over 120 countries. She’s authored 26 New York Times bestsellers. (Continue Reading)
8/7/15 — Love Those Reading Lists!
Some of my favorite reading comes from lists. With enticing names like “Best,” “Great,” or even “Chosen,” they promise new discoveries and hours of entertainment. I know not everyone feels this way—Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada criticizes summer reading lists as stress inducers—but to me, reading lists actually remove the stress. Someone else has done the hard work of getting the goodies together, and I get to pick and choose what I want and ignore the rest. (I’ve even offered a few lists of my own in this space.) (Continue Reading)
08/04/15 – TO SLEEP, PERCHANCE TO WRITE
When I’m not writing, I spend much of my time as a sleep evangelist, leading a nonprofit (Start School Later) dedicated to school hours in sync with sleep needs. In that role, I’m always 
looking for ways to persuade people to value sleep—and it struck me that I could almost certainly call on the writers of the world for some pithy, poignant, and mellifluous thoughts on the subject. (Continue Reading)
08/01/15 – FIVE TIPS FOR MARKETING YOUR POETRY
“I wrote this for myself. Would you mind taking a look at it?”
One of my students at a poetry workshop asked me that recently. I asked, if she wrote it for herself, why did she care what I thought? She said, “Well, I might publish it someday.”
There are as many reasons to write poetry as there are poets. I’ve heard people say they write to express their inner feelings. Some say they write to “deal with” their depression, or understand their romantic relationships, or to heal after a loved one’s death. What I rarely, if ever, hear, is that their goal is communicate these feelings to readers.
When I started to write poetry in earnest a few years ago, I found many wonderful books filled with great advice about how to write better poetry, but none about what to do with your poetry once it was finished. (Continue Reading)
07/29/15 – PREVIEW OF AUGUST 1 GUEST BLOGGER, POET PETER M. GORDON
Prizewinning poet Peter M. Gordon, our August 1 Guest Blogger, offers five tips for marketing your poetry in the August 1 version of Late Last Night Books. His poems have appeared in Slipstream, 34th Parallel, the Provo Canyon Review, 5-2 Crime Poetry, Cultural Weekly, and several other magazines and websites. He’s President of the Orlando Area Poets and teaches in Full Sail University’s Film Production MFA program. His collection, Two Car Garage, was published by CHB Media and is available on Amazon.com and other bookselling sites.
