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:
Many storytellers serve a writing apprenticeship in journalism. The skills essential to good reporting are valuable tools to the author of fiction. But the habits of journalism can also be a handicap. One author who made the transition most memorably was Ernest Hemingway. by David Benjamin I learned “AP style” by absorption. By the time……
Read More...I once got in trouble with the agent racket by writing a series of essays about the callousness of the rejections I received to my painstakingly composed queries. But in the process of making overtures to every branch of the publishing industry, I learned lessons about how rejections get dished out and how, as a……
Read More...by David Benjamin Once a writer has created a character, given him or her a history and subjected said character to the rigors of an entire novel, breaking up is hard to do. This brainchild has very likely taken on a life of his or her own over the course of a long story and……
Read More...By David Benjamin This edition of Write Away was delayed, with the author’s apologies, by travel and Covid-19. Here I discuss a force that has changed, mostly for the better, the very nature of literature—the invention of the motion picture camera. Just as literature before film referred backward to previous writings, mingling old stories with……
Read More...Starting out a story is a challenge that tempts the author to overwrite, to unload his or her whole vocabulary, to deploy an arsenal of literary devices in a sort of prose blitzkrieg. tThe author also faces an implicit market demand to hit the reader with razzle-dazzle, blood and guts, right off the bat. This……
Read More...Among the most important characters in television history is Tony Soprano, a murderous adulterer who was, nevertheless, likable. His guilt and insecurities inspired empathy in his audience and instilled in them a sense of moral ambiguity rare in popular entertainment. This installment of Write Away ponders the writer’s imperative to create bad guys who are……
Read More...Where do you get your ideas? Everybody has ideas, both mundane and fantastic. They run constantly through our heads. When I was sixteen, I remember leafing through ahigh-school yearbook whose editors had captioned, with exceptional wit, every photo in the gallery of seniors. One thumbnail, beneath a boy with a smirk of mock worldliness, has……
Read More...by David Benjamin Before publishing my novel, Jailbait, first in a crime series featuring smalltown police chief Jim Otis, I had top consider the impact of the title. The term, “jailbait,” has a long American history asa mild vulgarity not spoken in polite company. However, because the title is appropriate to my story, I kept……
Read More...Write Away — #13 Among the commonest—and most perplexing—comments I encounter when talking to readers at a book talk is: “I never read fiction.” I understand that reading nonfiction, about history, political science, economics, etc., carries an “educational” cachet, casting upon the reader a glow of seriousness. By contrast, then, fiction is somehow frivolous, a……
Read More...The road to bitterness When I was in tenth grade, I developed an infatuation with James Drought, an author whose yellow-backed Avon paperback, The Secret, I found on a revolving rack at the drugstore. Drought’s autobiographical novel—more of an extended diatribe—exuded the sort of educated rage and gloom that appealed to a cautiously rebellious and……
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