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 “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……
Read More...You can call it copy editing or nitpicking. But the exhaustive application of “style” rules, in grammar and punctuation are a basic necessity to the discipline and reputation of a serious writer. by David Benjamin “The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing……
Read More...by David Benjamin “Characterization is only hard because sometimes I feel I get so interested in it that I want to talk too much about the characters and that slows the story down. So I say, ‘Hey, people want to find out what’s going to happen next, they don’t want to listen to you spout……
Read More...by David Benjamin “The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered.” —D.H. Lawrence PARIS—One of my recurring arguments with readers—which never actually occur—is about the power of fiction to clarify the non-fictional reality in which we live and die. At almost every event where I shmooze with readers, I hear……
Read More...by David Benjamin “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” —Richard Bach PARIS—When I was in high school, it was my devoutest wish to call myself a writer. Lately, in book talks and public presentations, I’ve amended my title to “professional writer.” The rub is, what have I done to merit this presumption?……
Read More...by David Benjamin “He opened the passenger side. He flipped open the glovebox and gently withdrew his Colt .44, a gun he rarely heeled and never fired. Once in a while, he displayed it for effect. It looked pretty much like the gun that John Wayne and Clint Eastwood had used to blow the brains……
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