Regardless of how long you’ve been writing, or how successful you’ve been in your literary career, you have more to learn. This series of essays is dedicated to that proposition. Each is a boiled-down observation on some element of the craft I’ve been trying to master for more than fifty years. I offer these thoughts to my colleagues and welcome your lessons in return.
Write Away Essays:
by David Benjamin “The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest.” ―Sinclair Lewis, Main Street MADISON, Wis.—A while ago, I was one of several writers reading passages……
Read More...by David Benjamin “We do this because it gives us, vicariously and from a great distance, a share in the glamour and the counterfeit heroism that accrues to sports champions. As we suffer through every day’s degrading race against our fellow rats, the Packers are an endless, regularly scheduled series of voyages into the unknown.……
Read More...Specialty writers are a rich resource to a storyteller. The most important lesson they teach is attention to detail, especially when the story ranges far from home. by David Benjamin “When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture.” ― Pauline Kael PARIS—During my sojourn in Japan, I was……
Read More...Writing can be taught, and there are curricula—and prestigious college seminars—devoted to “creative writing.” But can you teach creativity? by David Benjamin “However great a man’s natural talent may be, the art of writing cannot be learned all at once.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau MADISON, Wis.—It has always been my conviction that you can’t teach creativity.……
Read More...Readers can turn agains an author if the details of a report or a story are so inaccurate that they are noticeable. Credibility can be a chasm for the writer who doesn’t bother to check and double-check. by David Benjamin “People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it.” ― Alan Furst MADISON,……
Read More...by David Benjamin “It is strange how often a heart must be broken “Before the years can make it wise.” ― Sara Teasdale MADISON, Wis.—Before I was out of high school, I had twice suffered a broken heart. In the summer of ’66, a girl named Linda broke my heart so gently that it barely……
Read More...by David Benjamin “He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected … He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.” Sherlock Holmes MADISON, Wis.—What I said up there isn’t strictly true. In……
Read More...by David Benjamin “How to write: butt in chair. Start each day anywhere. Let yourself do it badly. Just take one passage at a time. Get butt back in chair.” Anne Lamott MADISON, Wis.—Since the mid-1970s, I’ve spent my life deep in the editorial hole with no way out and no serious effort to escape.……
Read More...by David Benjamin “From journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct and interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there.” ― Isabel Allende MADISON,……
Read More...by David Benjamin “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly……
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