Adjust text size:
A Conspiracy of Pages
[Etching: "The Hall of Planets," by Erik Desmazières, #5 in a series of eleven illustrating an edition of "The Library of Babel," by Jorges Luis Borges; click to enlarge] From whiskey river: The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was [...]
From the Dark Side
I’ve written before (here and elsewhere) about the writing workshop I participated in, fifteen-some years ago. An odd cast of characters, maybe: three writers of poetry and literary fiction then seeking their graduate degrees in English, with an emphasis on creative writing; one writer of comic action stories (think Carl Hiaasen, maybe with a touch [...]
Fiction and (Overly) Real Life
[Photo by Alan Bauer] I want to share with you a little anecdote about one of the wild joys of writing a novel. But let’s put real life aside for a moment; let’s start with a hypothetical. Let’s say you’re writing a novel, as follows: A certain set of events must happen at night, say, [...]
Paying Attention to What You Want
From Seems to Fit: “For this one time,” [Bonnie] said aloud, “I want us each to think about the same question, one question, while we do this. We don’t have to say anything out loud, and we don’t have to spend more than ten minutes doing it, I don’t think—” George: “Wait! Brandy first, question [...]
Savage Beasts
A first for Running After My Hat: a guest blogger! Kate Lord Brown is already familiar to some of you as the curator of the blog What Kate Did Next. (She also instigated the Burning Lines experiment in collaborative online fiction of a couple years ago.) More recently, though — and the reason she’s feeling [...]
Spark of Interest
[Video: "Musical Tesla Coils: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies." For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.] From whiskey river: What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to [...]
Not Trying Quite So Hard, But It Feels Right
[Image: "Comb of Retrospection," by Michael Leunig] From whiskey river: How I Would Paint Happiness Something sudden, a windfall, a meteor shower. No – a flowering tree releasing all its blossoms at once, and the one standing beneath it unexpectedly robed in bloom, transformed into a stranger too beautiful to touch. (Lisel Mueller, from Alive [...]
Ineffable
[For information about this image, see the note at the foot of this post.] From whiskey river: There it is; the light across the water. Your story. Mine. His. It has to be seen to be believed. And it has to be heard. In the endless babble of narrative, in spite of the daily noise, [...]
Paying Attention to the Click
Nearly every writer, I imagine — maybe we can even dispense with the nearly? — has favorite words. It’s certainly true of me. Some of them are words I just like the sound of. Some of them have meanings just too right: I can’t help reaching for those words whenever I set to writing or [...]
Making the Trip
[Trailer for Adaptation (2002), starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper and featuring a whole lot of other favorite, familiar faces] From whiskey river’s commonplace book (the archives): Human beings can’t live without the illusion of meaning, the apprehension of confluence, the endless debate concerning the fault in the stars or in ourselves. The [...]
