Madeleine E. Robins's Blog: Madeleine Robins: Journal, page 2

Miss Vickers Does Not Regret

I love the work of Sinclair Lewis.  Even though I know better. Even when his prose is didactic and braying and he can’t make up his mind who he most disdains: country folk, city folk, religious folk, doctors, lawyers, academics, politicians. Ever since high school I have felt like I needed to apologize, maybe even join a 12-step program, for my fascination with Lewis. And yet fascinated I am.

Why apologize? Lewis is respectable, albeit not much in fashion these days. He gave us the terms “Main S...

For God’s Sake, Think of the Children

I wonder, sometimes, if anyone writing for TV has ever met a child.  Or anyone writing for film.  Or even just writing fiction.  So often, kids appear in one of the following guises:

As the well-behaved dress accessory
As the clever, snarky brat
As the magic engine of emotional change
As the target of horrifying eeevil
As a sickly sweet Sainted child

What they don’t so much show up as are as people.

The dress-accessory child is sometimes issued as part of the “have-it-all” package, often to a...

A Fire on 95th Street

It would be difficult to find a neighborhood more concentrated with left-leaning intelligentsia than the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  Which is not to say there are not conservatives, curmudgeons, and random people who think the world is going to hell in a handbag, but the traditional Person On The Street on the Upper West Side is likely, at the very least, to be four-square for the First Amendment.

Which is why my daughter burning a book on the sidewalk occasioned considerable outrage.

It was ...

50 Shades of Perseverance

This is a piece that originally appeared in 2012 in the Book View Cafe blog.

Sherwood Smith had a very interesting post on her Live Journal about writer-brains, persistence, and careers.  It comes down to (in my reading): most writers aren’t in it for the money or the fame, but for other, less tangible benefits.  This can seem inexplicable to the writer’s family, friends, and the genpop.

In some ways I’m luckier than many of my colleagues, whose families didn’t get any of this and tried to apply...

My Friends at the Graveyard

When I was a kid and we went to Massachusetts every weekend, my parents would sometimes drop my brother and me off at a graveyard next door to the grocery, so we could run about while they provisioned the household.  Thus began my lifelong fondness for graveyards.

Morbid?  Not really.  I’m a story junkie, and every gravestone hints at a story.  Some of them tell whole chapters, others are, um, story prompts.  My favorite tombstone ever was that of Miss Lucinda Laird, only daughter of Mr. Samuel...

Violent Beasts

I am a mother as well as a writer, and one of the types I have encountered over my parental career is the parent (usually but not always the Mom) who is trying to raise her child without violence.  I don’t mean, No Spanking, I mean “we don’t talk about the news in front of Little Smedley.”  I mean no Warner Bros. cartoons because of “all the terrible things Wyle E. Coyote does to that poor wee bird.”  I mean the mother whose son horrified her by picking up a stick, pointing it and saying “pew pe...

Yes, Things Were Different Then

A few years ago, an editor I very much admire said something that made my eyes cross.  Im paraphrasing here, because Im too lazy to go look the exact quote, but, in answer to a neophyte writer who wanted to know if she had to do a whole lot of research in order to write historical fiction or historical fantasy, the editor said (paraphrasing, right?): you have to do some, but people are basically people, no matter when/where you set them.

Eyes crossing right now.

The world has changed since I...

Working Together

[image error]In the early 90s I started writing the book that became The Stone War. Itsfor lack of a better terma home-town apocalypse book about a disaster, or rather disasters, befalling New York City. The Stone War was published in 1999; after 9/11, a number of people (none of them New Yorkers) said brightly, Oh, its just like your book! No, it was not; the only similarity was in scenes, early on, of people walking away from the site of the disaster. Like you might, if something frightening and huge...

You Know What You Know

Everyone is an expert about something. Most people dont even think about their areas of expertiseone guys an expert at making jam; another at building stone walls; the next person can drape a Victorian bodice (but doesnt think of this as expertise because its just a hobbyas if people dont lavish time, money, and intelligence on the things they do for loveI mean really).  Think about yourself: you know stuff, right?  Things that may not bring you money but fascinate you.  My husband, a...

Perhaps It’s Time to Talk About Sex

(The title of this post is a direct quote from my mother, who, when I said Sure, Ma.  What do you want to know? sighed in relief and retired to her room with a cup of tea.)

For someone who got her start writing romances, I often get uncomfortable writing about sex.  Why not?  Sex is good. But by and large I dont find sex, when described accurately, particularly sexy.  Sex, the act, is sometimes brutal, often comical, rarely lyrical, and can reveal deep vulnerabilities in the participants...