Author Archive

Who Owns This Story Anyway? 

Let us build for the years we shall not see. – Sir Henry John Newbold I saw it in her eyes first, what I expected to see. That flash. “No, Dad. That’s wrong.” Of course, I can’t blame her. I’d told the story “right” as many times as any story I’ve ever told. And I probably should have written this story down
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What Writers Need to Know about Talent and Self-Discipline

The most important thing you can do is a lot of work…. – Ira Glass       They need to slow down. Sitting with the other parents in the little orange plastic chairs at Charlotte’s cello lesson, I have to force myself to be quiet. The teacher is trying hard to get the other kids (the boys) to go
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Why Writing Well Is All About Intensity

“…I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a fancy way of saying I started writing.”   I taught fiction at Mt. Hermon last week. The most
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How We May Finally Recover Ourselves

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T. S. Eliot   The life of faith is a rescue mission, I thought, listening to our pastor preach on the woman at the well in yesterday’s sermon. He explained how
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How Jesus Unblocked My Writer’s Block and Freed Me to Write–for Good

“We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness.” – Thomas Merton All art, writing included, is built on ideas. The size of those ideas can’t be measured,
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