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 “Memory is, among the faculties of the human mind, that of which we make the most frequent use … Memory is the primary and fundamental power, without which there could be no other intellectual operation.” ―Samuel Johnson MADISON, Wis.—“There’s a holdup in the Bronx,/ Brooklyn’s broken out in fights … ” Ask……
Read More...by David Benjamin “It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which……
Read More...by David Benjamin “A writer returns home after a long evening’s work of waiting tables, only to find his house a pile of smoldering rubble. Policemen and firemen poke grimly through the remains. The writer leaps out of his car and runs over to a detective. “‘Oh God! My house! What happened? Where are my……
Read More...by David Benjamin “Every good joke contains an element of the riddle—it may be childishly simple, or subtle and challenging—which the listener must solve. By doing so, he is lifted out of his passive role and compelled to co-operate, to repeat to some extent the process of inventing the joke, to re-create it in his……
Read More...The querying of an agent or publisher is essentially the process of presenting a fake persona to a coldblooded and impatient personnel manager who is concealed behind a false front of cordial empathy. (The cover of The Voice of the Dog is the work of photographer Max Kleinen.) by David Benjamin “Outside of a dog,……
Read More...by David Benjamin “So shall the world go on,/ To good malignant, to bad men benign,/ Under her own weight groaning.” ― John Milton, Paradise Lost MADISON, Wis.—Walt Disney has said that a movie’s only as good as its villain. He illustrated this precept with the Evil Queen in Snow White and Cruella……
Read More...by David Benjamin “I feel naked without a Hi-Liter in my pocket.” — David Benjamin MADISON, Wis.—What would you underline? In ninth grade, when I started buying books—instead of depending solely on the public library—I fell almost instinctively into the habit of underlining paragraphs, sentences, passages, even single words that tickled my fancy.……
Read More...by David Benjamin “I just like the idea of trying to write for all those versions of me out there, wherever they are.” —Sherman Alexie “The good writer seems to be writing about himself (but never is) but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself, and all……
Read More...Every spring, the Robert M. Schuster Short Prose Awards at La Follette High School in Madison afford me the opportunity to read young writers’ work and to examine how these kids’ see and depict their world, compared to how, why and what I wrote when I was their age. PARIS— I was a teenage……
Read More...by David Benjamin MADISON, Wis.— Since I was never admitted—nor did I seek admission—to a prestigious university creative-writing program, I don’t know if the students in these curricula are taught much about digging. I learned to dig, rather, as a newspaper reporter and editor. None of my bosses in journalism gave me digging instructions,……
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