A body of work
by David Benjamin We remember one of the last century’s literary immortals, J.D. Salinger, by one great novel, The Catcher in the Rye, ten short stories and a few insignificant novellas. He apparently stopped writing anything 45 years before he died. It’s conceivable that, while living all that time in seclusion somewhere in New Hampshire,…
Archives
- Write Away – Write about yourself, but not about your self
- The allure of formula in mystery prose
- A novelist’s guide to dining in Paris
- The Elements of Character
- The Ember of Anger
- The Midwest: American Literature’s Diaspora
- The seven keys of storytelling
- Don’t Do It, Kid!
- The agent rejection I’d like to see
- The mirage of the market
- The road to bitterness
- Kid stuff?
- The sacredly profane
- Where do you get your ideas?
- The appeal of the ambiguous
- The first ‘graph Blues
- Why writers talk about movies
- The evolution of a character
- Write Away: The fatal cup of tea
- The nexus of fiction and journalism
- The telling detail
- A nose for news
- Writing in lost wax
- Bill Faulkner makes an elevator pitch
- Cold coffee and hot copy
- When to stop reading a book
- Finding the “Everyman” sweet spot
- Cumulative, agglutinative, intuitive
- Genre: Pick it and stick with it
- Be clever, kid, but not …
- A body of work
- The writer as reader
- The author as housekeeper
- The church-lady factor
- The invisible poetry of prose
- The moment of narrative confidence
- Toying with time
- The author as educator
- The author as entertainer
- The author as expert
- To recur or not recur
- Swimming the sea of metaphor
- Emotional distance and reader empathy
- Satire: Bathtubs and edible babies
- Satire revisited
- The rabbit pellet in the caviar bowl
- Characterization in shades of gray
- Seven Mutations of Recollection
- The aggressive mind
- Why every author needs a gun catalog
- The Kafka thread
- “Where do you get your ideas?”
- The Ed McBain Factor
- The inwardness of the dead-serious teenager
- The other me
- Michelangelo strokes his brush
- Sympathy for the Devil
- The query trap
- The “creative type”
- “A high-concept gritty romantic suspense thriller”
- The paradox of smalltown crime
- The seven species of memory
- Jim Otis’ gun
- “Professional”
- “What’s your story?”
- Characters and types
- “Style” is not fashion
- The magic of “narrative transportation”