“Write what you know” goes the old saw from creative writing classes. Momentarily putting aside objections from science fiction, fantasy, etc., there is undoubtedly some truth to the advice. ...
Levine continues: By the time I was twenty-one years old I’d begun to think of myself as something of an accomplished poet; what I lacked — among other things — was a recognizable, consiste...
Literary critics and regular readers often have things to say about a writer’s voice. Many think that the most-read writers are those whose voice is so clear that it can be singled out from all...
Just as the novel has an affinity for the political but is not required to encompass the political, the poem has an affinity for philosophy but is not required to appeal to or include the philoso...
I do not say that the novel must be, or more often than not is, political. But where there are characters, the political may be found. A writer chooses to accent, plunge into, or ignore the polit...
Well then, a poet writes a line, or a fiction writer writes a sentence, but how do we judge the order of the words? This is not an easy question to answer. Let’s look at some well-known sentenc...
We have all either read or heard about a book titled The Joy of Sex, unless the book is now too old to interest today’s young people, who seem to have preferred to discover the joy of sex first...
The thingies can make the difference between a wonderful poem and one that’s not quite there. We want to write books that expand our view of the world, that dare to examine the relation between...
You have no choice. There is no way around it. “It” being the small stuff. And if you can learn to love it, you will be happier. Face it: the big stuff is surrounded by the small stuff, to al...
Until we learn what sentences can do, we tend to underrate them. We treat sentences as if they were floors, a kind of planking, something we have to walk on in order to get to the next room. We a...