Categories Archives: On Craft

What Happened to Standards of Excellence?

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I’m all for raising standards of excellence, in ethics, politics, morals, education. Especially standards of excellence in writing, which is what I attempt to do. I write fiction and I am always appalled by how little vocabulary people know today, even people who call themselves writers, or are published as writers. The multi-syllabic word is [...]

Done. But is it Literature?

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I feel like I’ve finally finished my novel, Banana Republican Blues. The aim was always to write a farce that would pass as Literature. I’ve been working on it intensively the past several months, cutting out lots of stuff, refining and tweeking other stuff, adding more character and plot development, some intellectual substance, a little Tom Robbins [...]

Comments Please.

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Here is a paragraph I recently wrote into my novel. What say you all? Is it a darling that needs to be killed, or kept? In the darkest part of his heart he knew it would tell her nothing necessary and was, in short, the typical screed of a narcissistic VIP. It rationalized his own [...]

The Value of a Well Made Thing.

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One of the points I make in my book, Banana Republican Blues lies in following passage: Eddie spent his night in jail pondering his situation and composing his Doctrine of the One True Chili. The titular topic was a very small part of Eddie’s aggrieved philosophy. It repudiated everything he once held true, except for [...]

On Point of View

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Believing that limited choices foster creativity, I decided to tell my entire tale from single character’s point of view. Using the illeistic third, rather than first person narrative, he occasionally reveals himself in a journal he keeps in first person. This detaches the character from himself a little, which does create some distance from the [...]

More on “Mating.”

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Norman Rush’s ‘Mating’ sends my BS detector soaring. A sure sign of amateurism in fiction is the info dump, in which the author loads the reader up with back story, world building material, or other facts and figures he feels one needs to understand the central conflict. Rather than being parceled out gradually on a [...]

Thoughts on Norman Rush’s “Mating”

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I’ve been reading Norman Rush’s Mating, a national book award winner, and for a book that purports to be so learned, this passage in particular struck me as strange. “Nelson would propose to Peter that they each have the power to name the other’s firstborns, always assumed to be male, interestingly. During these accounts I felt fortunate having [...]