John Reed's Blog: Notes on Writing

She shows up, hangs around, and smiles at me.
I hover over her hair, and she knows.
They visit like this, when they're in-between.
Hard to say who's putting on the show.
You can see any part of a woman
if you look hard enough at her face.
To see her lips move, you can't listen,
and she knows you can't hear her from her waist.
Good trick: the overcoat then all that skin.
No matter how it goes, I break and break,
and I count the delights, for saints and winners.
And if I could just say what I can't say
I w...

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In graduate school, for sure, prose writers will encounter times that they have to write poetry. If you're having trouble, a small idea: try a form. Sonnet, Villanelle, concrete poetry, etc. Any form will do.

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If you're moving well on a first draft, or find a natural way to write something, I would proceed without worrying about whether or not you know what you're doing, because:

a) your unconscious may be working out elements as you work
b) there may be an internal logic that there already, but you don't understand it yet
c) you may not like what it's about, and never accept the truth

Two other reasons:

1) There's that famous Duchamp quote.  When asked how one might understand a particular sculpture, D...

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Sea-moon blue. He marries the Paris sky,
her eyes, and a loose knit dress of fine wool.
Just the color, and she'll never know why—
their love no more lie, their life no less full
than a marriage for pride or weeping want.
A boy will always miss the beach, the gulls—
the thoughtless gaze, the begging and the taunts.
And at low tide the city is wet sand
and the seaside town of seventeen-fifty-five
and buckets of beer and cherry stone clams
and poorhouses, oysters, apples and dives.
And love is long or fa...

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Often, when discussing technical aspects of fiction, one encounters a startling lack of consistency in the language. One person says "close third" while another says "close to character." One person talks about "narrative design" while another talks about "structure." Many many such examples. My guess is that the language lacks consistency because the art form can never be fully understood, or quantified. Talking about these issues is crucial to one's development as a writer, but, perhap...

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You live on the other side of the world,
and somewhere between us, in the ocean,
me with my crutches and you with your curls,
and the green coffee house with big muffins,
and the fanciest restaurant in town
(that used fresh basil and canned tomatoes),
and you and me in sex till we drowned,
and running through the corn to scare the crows—
we stay there, still and always wise young fools.
Bruised, raw, scratched, bitten, and frayed at the sleeve.
You and me, together on the lambswool.
And even now, now, m...

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If your subject matter is sentimental, try to keep your prose clean, unsentimental, unsappy. Cut mercilessly, and your pages won't betray you for the mushy cornball you are.

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A risk in first person: oddly enough, is having a narrative that's difficult to follow. If the character is deeply unreliable, troubled, or crazy, the POV can obfuscate the story. Also, the narrator in question may not have access to important scenes and/or information.

Distant first person: can be extremely effective in conveying a disconnected character—also, can solve the problem mentioned above (a difficult to read first-person narrator).

The big advantage to close third person: the autho...

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One hears it all the time. Usually, with qualifications. Such as: writers will often write from direct experience, but sometimes they'll find themselves far afield, certainly with the historical writings or science fiction. And authors will often attest to how surprised they were to find out what they knew, about times and places and technology (etc) that seemed utterly foreign to them. There is a powerful argument to remaining close to home, but even when the writing is founded firmly in...

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John Updike refers to his undergraduate education as having a "haunted quality." The subject recently came up in a class of mine at New School, and then with an editor friend of mine, Jacob. The haunted quality of undergraduate education, to me, has to do with so much of the focus being outdated—an emphasis on public domain works and creative movements long gone. Jacob's theory was that the education was more valuable once forgotten. That it infuses your material more naturally, easily, w...

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