Beth Kephart's Blog, page 296

Let the cards fall

For a few lovely hours this week, I let every worry go and toured the Please Touch Museum, now located in Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park, on the former Philadelphia Centennial grounds.  Here I am, within Alice's Wonderland.  Untrammeled by self-doubt.  Unchased by corporate demands.  Unsure of why I've been so knotted up, to begin with.

We have to let some things go.  We have to let ourselves free. 

Novel Writing: Lessons Learned

I should, I told my son last night, make a list of everything I've learned this week about writing novels.

He nodded.  He was amenable.  He almost always is.  We'd been talking over dinner about how much this novel-in-progress of mine has changed, and about how frustrated I've been during the changing.  Frustrated, then illuminated.  Finally enlightened and set free.

For example, I have learned (re-learned, I learn the same things each time), that if you don't know what a story means, what it i...

Words from a novel long in progress

When I open my eyes she's at the edge of my bed, a bowl in her hands, and a spoon.

"You didn't eat," she says.

"I'm not hungry."

"Sit up."

Outside my window, in a puddle of moon, the gypsies are singing some song. "Gazpacho," Stella tells me, fixing the pillow behind me and fitting the bowl in my lap until she turns, too, to watch Arcadio in the love seat, his guitar on his knee, his fingers running hard against the strings. Angelita pulls at her dress like it's an animal she can't trust; she w...

C.K. Williams On Whitman/Reflections

The books continue to pile up around here, and I remain a weak reading sister—too consumed with tying up corporate projects while trying to pierce the veil of a manuscript in progress, two things not best done at the same time.  Lousy excuses—selfish, self-involved—and it is time to sit up straight, to get on with things, to declare on this blog, at this time, that I thoroughly enjoyed my read of C.K. Williams' On Whitman.  It's a pocketbook-sized book done up in a symphony of greens.  Person...

Logan Circle

Philadelphia, contemplated.
It's where books begin.

Losing sentences, holding onto story

I was nearly destroyed by my ten-year-in-progress manuscript yesterday.  The pacing was off, and I couldn't find a cure.

I sat with my old photographs, my boxes of books, my research.  I sat with all 240-plus pages half on my lap, half on the floor.  I sat, and I'm glad that I couldn't see my own face.  Frustration?  Bewilderment?  Exhaustion?  All three?  You're all washed up, Kephart, I said.

But then last night I slept a little (sleep is something else, I tell you), and when I woke I knew ju...

Corporate abrasions

I was the kind of kid who opted out of long summers by the South Carolina shore so that I could stay in muggy Philadelphia to work in a life insurance shop, mimeographing newsletters and keeping score for salesmen.  Or, if I did go to the beach, I worked the sunny days in shops with names like The Mole Hole.  At the University of Pennsylvania, I catered meals among museum mummies or checked in musty library books at Van Pelt.  At twenty-five, I started a business.  I've been serving clients s...

Working an old book new

Take a novel-in-progress, ten years old.   Call it ninety drafts, though you believe it's many more.  Take every original character out, but two.   Change the plot.  Change the genre.  Change the cast (save for those original two).  Keep only the landscape, and a scene or two with food.  Change the tense and change the tone.  Weave and dodge and braid.  Uphold the bulls.  Encourage the horses.  Explore Seville.

If you are still working on this novel it's because it will not let you go. 

The Bookslut review of The Heart is Not a Size

Colleen Mondor isn't just the force behind Chasing Ray, and she isn't just an author in her own right.  She is also a Bookslut reviewer—writing, for the rest of us, some of the most thoughtful reviews around.  I spoke, at the Book Blogger Convention, about reviews that writers learn from.  I learned so much from these words about The Heart is Not a Size that I have reprinted them in full, hoping that Bookslut and Colleen don't mind.  Colleen gives me cause (gives me strength) to continue to f...

And then it ended

I was afraid of losing the light.  She sat up high, against the sun, gave me one photo more.