All The Insight of a Rabbit Updike, John (1960). Rabbit, Run. New York: Random House, 264 pp. This is the first of the “Rabbit” tetralogy, and the book that established Updike as one of the greatest American novelists (and won … Continue reading
This is the latest post in a series of maybe a dozen, concerning the process of writing my current project, working title Chocotle. As a progress report, I’m finishing up chapter 18 now, which will put me at about 57,000 … Continue reading
My last post on the process of writing my current novel was over a month ago. Then, I considered why sometimes chapters came to an end before I was ready, when I still had more to say. My answer was … Continue reading
Rushdie, Salman (1990). Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta Books. 212 pp. A Fantastic Essay on Writing This is perhaps Rushdie’s most accessible book, ostensibly a children’s fairy tale, set in a fantasy world far away. An Indian … Continue reading
Wright, Stephen (994). Going Native. New York: Dell Publishing. Writing For the Sake of Writing This widely praised novel is more like a collection of very loosely connected short stories. The writing is interesting, some of the sentences hallucinatory. That’s … Continue reading
Life’s Three Great Pleasures Considered Nickles, Sara, & Shacochis, Bob (Eds.) (1994) Drinking, Smoking, & Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. 200 pp. This anthology of stories, essays, and poems (many of them excerpts from larger works) recalls a time … Continue reading
I’ve written a half-dozen posts reflecting on the process of writing Chocotle, a seedling novel. Previous posts are somewhere lower in the stack. I’m writing this one sooner than I expected, because Chapter 7 slammed shut after only 10 pages. … Continue reading
This is the latest post in the series on my writing process during the long struggle to create Chocotle, which wants to be a novel. It now has 23,000 words, which is 25% to 33% of a modest novel. I like … Continue reading
I like to sample pop music in very brief doses, just to have a sense of what the young people are thinking, and because, well, the Beatles are dead, man. I catch bands appearing on late night shows like Colbert, … Continue reading
This is the fourth or fifth post about the process of writing “Chocotle,” a someday novel. I thought it would be interesting for me, and maybe also to others, to document the process of writing it, in parallel with the … Continue reading