There is a difference between visiting a place and being taught by it. Tourism gives you impressions. Fieldwork—the kind that involves returning in different seasons, taking measurements, sitting alone in churches until the silence becomes uncomfortable—gives you something harder to name and more difficult to acquire: an understanding of how a place works upon a […]
Five Things Cortona Taught Me About Writing Sense of Place Read More »
There are readers, and there are novelist-readers. The two experiences are not the same. A reader surrenders to the story; a novelist-reader surrenders and watches himself surrendering, noting every mechanism that eases or impedes the fall. I cannot pick up another author’s book without half my mind standing apart, pencil in hand—not exactly to judge,
Reading Like a Novelist: What I Look for in Other People’s Books Read More »
The question of point of view is the first serious decision a novelist makes, and it shapes everything that follows—the texture of the prose, the range of the story, the emotional distance between reader and character. Writers have many options: first-person, second-person, omniscient third, limited third, close third, or some combination of these. For my
Why I Write in Close Third-Person POV Read More »
