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 “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……
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……
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,……
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……
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.……
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……
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……
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,……
by David Benjamin MADISON, Wis.—A question readers often ask is, “Where do you get your ideas?” The short, smartass answer is “My head.” The candid response is hard to express because inspiration varies from story to story, book to book. What I’ve learned, for sure, however, is that you can’t fashion a good yarn……
The choice between writing “realism” or venturing into science-fiction and fantasy is often irrevocable, unless the writer can somehow follow the unique example of Franz Kafka. by David Benjamin MADISON, Wis.—Every fiction writer, often subconsciously, decides early in life whether to base his or her stories in the “real” world or to venture instead……