This is a metaphor that I’m borrowing from mystery writer Michael Connelly. He writes: From somewhere in my memory, either amateur hour TV or the boardwalk in Venice, I remember a sideshow act called plate spinning. The object of this entertainment endeavor is to rotate plates balanced on thin wooden dowels. The practitioner gets several […]
A lot of times, rhetoric is taught in college with the immediate purpose of helping students become better at writing college papers. But what I love about rhetoric is it’s everyday, normal uses. When we first moved into this apartment, my daughter’s door would jam, and sometimes I would have a really hard time opening […]
Writing is like taking care of sick kids. It takes a lot of hard work, and a lot of time. Your kids and your writing always seem to need you, and sometimes they keep you up all night. Like taking care of sick kids, writing can involve cleaning up gross messes. Sometimes you need to […]
You know it’s a first draft of your novel when you write the following sentences in one of the closing scenes of your book: They kissed. And then they kissed some more. Yes. I just put that in my novel. It will be much different in the second draft. It will still involve kissing, but […]
A couple weeks ago I took my 2-year-old to the Phoenix Art Museum–and she loved it. Her favorite exhibit was filled with modern art and was titled, “Order, Chaos, and the Space Between: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Diane and Bruce Halle Collection.” This was one of the pieces. She got super excited and […]