Averil Dean's Blog, page 19

Pods

At our office, I get the mail. It’s the high point of my workday, no matter the weather, a chance to leave the bustle of the office and breathe the soft air and stretch my legs. Yesterday it was late when I went out. The sun was low and the leaves were tinged with gold, and as I locked up the mailbox and stood with my arms full of letters, a breeze stirred the branches and sent a snowfall of fluffy white seed pods floating around me, each one spinning gently, falling and rising a little and d...

Around the Block

Chuck Wendig’s post is so much better than what I had planned to write today that I think I’ll just direct you there, and then you can maybe wander back later and tell me what you think.

Writer’s block: myth or malady?

Bones

Houston, we have a story. The pieces came together in that late-night way they do sometimes, when you knock a stack of books and your only pair of glasses off the nightstand because you’re in too much of a hurry to lay hands on your notebook. Oh, the relief when you write the idea down in time, right? Just before it slithers away.

Of course I haven’t laid down a formal outline at this point. I’m not sure I want to. I do believe in having a structure in place before starting a book, at least in...

Kansas

It’s almost time to start the next thing. Which is…what? What am I hoping to write? What are you? A handwritten journal in lavender ink, the pages bound with ribbon? A doorstop saga, first of a trilogy, eight hundred pages long? Deckle-edged, French-flapped, literary wank, fatter than the fattest Tartt. Hollywood tell-all, written from your farmhouse in Kansas? Or a tricky little novel to be read while looking through the slits of a plastic mask, with a velvet cover and pages edged in black a...

Wings

The writer by the nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. – Carson McCullers

Writers on dreaming, from A Writer’s Book of Days:

William Styron said the whole concept of Sophie’s Choice was the result, if not of a dream, of a kind of waking vision.

If Amy Tan was stuck on the ending of a story, she took the story with her to bed and let it become part of the dream.

Robert Stone said, “The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing...

We Were Liars

WOW.

I did not see that coming.

When’s the last time you read a book where the author really palmed the ace?

Back of the Church

How confident are you?

I will tell you a story.

Last March, I spent a few days on Whidbey Island, in a wonderful farmhouse with four of my dearest friends. During the day, we wrote. At night, we ate and drank and read our stuff and talked into the wee hours. One evening I asked for help choosing a bit of Alice Close Your Eyes for an upcoming reading. I chose chapter three, I think, something about the bike in the tree and the two characters meeting at a café. But one of my friends suggested a r...

Snapshots

I’ve been sitting here for an hour and have nothing to show for it. The fact is, my mind is elsewhere. An outline is forming around this new story idea, and for the moment I’m finding it hard to concentrate on anything else.

Still here.

Yeah, I’ve got nothing. Just a head full of small-town images: long, low buildings, faded and shredding at the seams like old denim; dormant cornfields, exhausted cows; gas-station sign missing two of its letters; an old brown barn in slow-motion collapse, leani...

Creation Story

When they became writers, from The Writer’s Book of Days:

M.F.K. Fisher said she became a writer when she was four. It was her way of screaming and yelling, the primal scream.

Madeleine L’Engle knew she was going to be a writer from the moment she wrote her first story. “I was five and it was called ‘G-R-U-L.’ I didn’t know how to spell girl. My father got a new typewriter when I was ten and gave me his old one. I immediately wrote my first novel.”

James Michener didn’t start writing until he wa...

Puppet House

Damn, I’m making a lot of mistakes right now. I spent the weekend dissecting a collection of movies and novels, desperately in search of a story. I seem to have arrived at the idea that I can simply cobble together a series of plot elements from other people’s work and plunk my characters into the mix and voilà! Insta-novel! As if the characters have nothing to do with what happens to them, as if they exist apart from the world I’m building instead of in it.

Deep breath. This is what happens w...