Susan K. Perry's Blog: Creating in Flow, page 39

4 Truths in a Psychologist's Fiction

The Good Psychologist is a novel by Noam Shpancer, who also blogs here at PT. Occasionally more didactic than the "typical" novel (if such a thing exists),  this book about a psychologist who also teaches is life affirming, true-to-life, and warmly reassuring about the value of good therapy.

As readers, we get to be voyeurs at therapy sessions, partake of the numbing experience of lecturing to a class of students who may as well be zombies (no, they're not, this isn't that kind of book), and w...

This Introvert Found Creative Flow

Towards Another Summer is a brilliant novel by Janet Frame, the famous author from New Zealand.

Frame lived in England for a number of years, but always felt herself to be an outsider, there and everywhere. If she was an introvert (and it has been suggested by one researcher that she was a high functioning autistic), this novel is the perfect expression of her experience as a struggling writer, and also of her discomfort in company.

Wrote Frame: "She applied literary surgery to free her...

Photos Lie, But For Whom?

I used to pay closer attention to events in the Middle East, having majored in the region in college. But then, happenings just kept getting more complicated, and solutions even further off. Maybe that's why I so appreciate those with the courage and persistence to report on the day-to-day mess over there.

One photojournalist who did just that, and who analyzed her own responses with intelligence and compassion, was Carol Spencer Mitchell. Danger Pay: Memoir of a Photojournalist in the...

How to Find the Zen of Writing

I'm finding that those who spend a lot of time staring at walls "to gain enlightenment" are not pushy people. What works for them may not work for everyone (not to mention that they're not trying to achieve a thing). So when I got a chance to read the most recent novel of a writer/teacher/Zen Buddhist and ask him some questions, I was eager to do so.

Here is my email interview with David Guy, who teaches writing at Duke University:

Q: For me, Jake Fades: A Novel of Impermanence was like a s...

Lit Agent Tells the Cold Hard Truth

 

Beginner or not, you face new challenges with each new writing project. It can be enormously beneficial and reassuring (or scary) to learn what's so-called normal or typical or average when it's time to send your work into the competitive publishing world.

Betsy Lerner, author of The Forest for the Trees, and I appeared together at a book festival panel about writing when the original edition of The Forest for the Trees came out. With the recent publication of the Revised Edition of this...

5 Freewriting Secrets for Being a "Genius"

You've heard of freewriting, certainly. At its most basic, it's about forcing your internal editor to stay away while you splash your most raw and unusual thoughts onto the page.

In Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insights, and Content (2nd edition, revised & updated), Mark Levy tells how he uses freewriting, not only to loosen up his writing muscles, but to solve business problems of all kinds.

Levy, author, writing teacher, and marketing strategist, shares a...

4 Revelations for Novelists (and One So-So Tip)

Revision is endless. Or maybe it only seems that way when you're fine-tuning your first novel, as I am. I'm sure I began submitting my sample chapters too early in the process. It's tough to know when you're "done," especially when your friends (and early readers) have raved about how moved they were.

As I read Thanks, But This Isn't For Us: A (Sort of) Compassionate Guide to Why Your Writing Is Being Rejected, by Jessica Page Morrell, several pieces of advice  made me turn back to the ...

The Real Lives of the Romantics? Not So Pretty

When I was a teenaged girl, I had the idea that marrying a poet, one of those like Shelley or Keats who evoked all my inchoate longings so magnificently, would be unremittingly romantic. Lord Byron was in that group, too, though he wasn't as hard up for money as the rest. Anyway, I had no idea of the reality of their and their mates' lives, financial or emotional.

And then, so many years later,  I read Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation, by Daisy Hay, ...

Use Your Senses to Be More Creative

The enthusiastic cover blurbs for Jeff VanderMeer's Finch claim the novel belongs to many genres: detective, fantasy, fungal noir, steampunk delirium. They also say it's a melding of Burroughs, Cormac McCarthy, David Goodis, Chandler, Ballard, Dick, James Ellroy, and more.

The more creative the mind behind the writing, the less easy to slot the novel into a single category. And the more imaginative the writer,  the more all of the reader's senses are called upon to fully experience the...

Down with Cell Phones: Julia Glass Daydreams Her Novels

Reading Julia Glass's fourth novel, The Widower's Tale, feels a bit like sinking into a just-right feather bed. The National Book Award-winner writes in a style that's literate without being pretentious, compelling without being in a rush, and emotional without turning sentimental. In The Widower's Tale, she adeptly juggles voices that encompass an age range from college to post-retirement, and that cross gender and class lines with compassion.

Julia Glass generously responded to my...