A Momentary Taste of Being

Pound's composition tips for young writers

by reading aloud An excellent suggestion that works particularly well for poetry.  I don't know about before an audience, but I'm sure that is helpful if the audience is so attuned.  It also helps you discover, even without an audience, infelicities of phrasing that might make comprehension difficult for a reader.

How to be a writer

Author explains The Last Ringbearer

Mailer v. Vidal For those who thought incivility in public was a relatively new phenomenon.  

Actually, according to statistics, something less than one in a million

I've come to value my little brother as the treasure he is--he brought this Neil Gaiman note to my attention.

Here's a event featuring a friend of mine from Dublin, Ohio.  He has a book out of writing exercises and is often featured on this blog.  If you live in Central Ohio, why not stop by and say hello. http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1286896141/efbnen

Michael Moorcock chats with Hari Kunzru

On The Road to Wigan Pier

"How to Write and Why"  in this edition featuring Flannery O'Connor, Joan Didion, and William Butler Yeats, among others Oh, and for his fans--Robert Bolano.

David Zeltserman, author of one of my favorite books last year, blogs on Vampires

O"Brien, Wolff talk about Vietnam

The Irish Big Five (or, rather, what they will earn for you.)

Dialogue in the Novel. As always, Prof. Myers educates in a highly readable and thoughtful way.  It sometimes makes one wish one had something to say.

Joyce Carol Oates on Emily Dickinson Raymond Chandler chats with Ian Fleming

Winston Churchill on Writing via Books Inq. Of course, one is left with the gnawing question, which Winston Churchill?  But not really, considering the link.

The Collecting Impulse

from Guns and Steel Yukio Mishima Let the reader not chide me for comparing my own trade to the white ant. In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away--of their corrosive function--just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid. Yet the simile is not accurate enough, for the copper and the nitric acid used in etching are on a par with each other, both being extracted from nature, while the relation of words to reality is not that of the acid to the plate. Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstractions for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably links the danger that the words themselves will be corroded too. It might be more appropriate, in fact, to liken their action to the excess of stomach fluids that digest and gradually eat away the stomach itself. (p. 8-9) Hmm, and this reader finds himself asking if it is true?  It is undeniably true that Mishima viewed words and his craf...

Craft in Fiction via Brandywine Books