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Time, time, time

See what’s become of me

As I look around for my possibilities.

I was so hard to please.

But look around,

The leaves are brown,

And the sky

Is a hazy shade of winter

-Paul Simon

(Song lyrics almost always suck when taken out of the context of music!)

If you ever work with me in the workshop, you will have to process my critical responses to your writing. Some students feel overwhelmed by my responses, find them incredibly negative, but please understand that I live for the moments when I may unabashedly praise my students! However, I shall never praise you unless praise is truly warranted; more importantly, I’ll never level negative criticism unless it, too, is truly warranted.

Consider the following spectrum:

Allegory_______________________________________Police report

There is a kind of story in which a narrator’s regard for another character is the focus, the primary reason for the narrative to exist. Some of you read The Great Gatsby in high school. Remember how mysterious, how intriguing Gatsby seemed to the narrator, the young guy who happened to rent a small house next door to Gatsby’s gaudy mansion? Can you see the parallel to the narrator/boss’s regard for Bartleby? There are many stories that take such a basic form. Many love stories have a similar dynamic; a mysterious “other” is often the focus of stories across the genres and sub-genres (even “superhero” stories). My point here is that if you (consciously or unconsciously) begin to conceive of a story in which such a dynamic is at play, “Bartleby the Scrivener” should echo through the dark chambers of your noggin! Read More

Sometimes, to create a sense of verisimilitude we over-describe, and usually do so regarding the most mundane activities, like getting a character from her car to the door of her house, through the door and into her house. 

I mean, if a character (in either a fiction or nonfiction narrative) approaches her or his apartment door and pulls a keychain from her or his pocket, do we (your readers) need to know that that character then chose the appropriate key, pushed that key into the lock, turned the key, then turned the doorknob and pushed open the door? Well, consider the following:

From Richard Katrovas: My rants are off-the-cuff mini-lectures on topics relevant to students of both fiction and nonfiction writing. When I teach “hybrid” writing workshops–classes that meet only six times in the classroom over the course of a semester–I send these ephemeral ditties to my students as follow-ups to our spirited, if infrequent, class discussions. The ones included here are general enough to make sense, I hope, to folks who were not privy to the conversations that spawned them.