Don DeLillo wrote: “One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.”
Can the same thing be said about a writer’s connection to the work of another?
In Silent Interviews, Samuel R. Delany said: “I begin, a sentence lover. I’m forever delighted, then delighted all over, at the things sentences can trip and trick you into saying, into seeing. I’m astonished—just plain tickled!—at the sharp turns and tiny tremors they can whip your thoughts across.
How does a sudden attack that puts a sword in your belly play from the inside? If you’d seen the blade properly would it be in your belly? Didn’t you see it properly a little too late, when it was up to the hilt? Shift that “blade” and we shift the awareness of it.
by Deborah Walker Ideas for my stories come to me in museums, in galleries, in libraries. Find me upstairs (and it’s always quieter upstairs) in the British Museum trawling the past looking for future inspiration. Old books, paintings, objects are part of our material heritage. Survivors of the ravages of times, sometimes cherished throughout the […]
An outline is a roadmap. It helps you decide the overall shape of the novel. It does not lock you into that structure if you stumble upon something interesting.
& Smell the Coffee-Colored Skin, White Authors!
Which came first—the chicken, the egg, or the egg white omelet—I don’t know. But the discussion glosses over an obvious gap: white authors.
My personal preference is for what I’ve called third-order answers. A lot of mysteries have an obvious culprit, and then a character who is, if you know your narrative conventions, the obvious alternative to the obvious culprit. I like mysteries that go one step further.
…I firmly believe that the joy found at the heart of reading is the same joy found at the heart of writing: it is the joy of discovery.
…I’m not going to discuss the importance of goals today. Instead, I’m going to discuss how worthless they are.
We do need, not more, but a deeper relationship with what we have. Not knowledge, or not just knowledge, but understanding. That’s what writers give us.
In her debut dark humor horror novel, a group of women must compete on a reality TV show for the heart of midwestern bachelor Tristan by spending a week in a haunted house. But after a shocking demise, the game takes a sinister turn.
Forthcoming work includes novella His Unburned Heart (about Mary Shelley and her husband’s heart) from Raw Dog Screaming Press (May, 2024) and novel Egyptian Motherlode (co-written with Jacob Weisman) from Fairwood Press (October, 2024).
