Inside the birthday card, they’d scribbled his favorite word, Guinness, and written something about hoping he would finally lose his virginity. The envelope was scribbled on, too. His name was in the center in block letters with sharp-leaning shadows behind them: M-A-R-K. They’d spent a few seconds adding smiley faces, some with stick bodies and a couple striking poses with triangle-shaped boobs. Around those, some hearts were added in different sizes but all swollen and about to burst at the center. In one corner was a sun with a happy face in it, but it’d been poorly drawn. The face was surrounded by limp sunrays so it could be a smashed spider with dotted eyes and a mouth on its back. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Fiction
The greatest mystery that mystery writer Gregory McDonald ever put over on readers was his hands-off, bordering-on-absent writing style. The author of The Fletch series almost entirely relies on dialogue in his novels. His books read similar to screenplays with little scenery description and sparse characterization. He explained in this interview excerpt his thoughts about the role a writer should assume as storyteller:
“The magic I attempt is to point the finger, as concisely as possible set the scene, then pull back my hand, disappear as the author, leave the reader alone with the characters. Of course the result of this is, not typical of authors, that tens of millions more people know the names of my characters than know my name, which I don’t mind a bit.”
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Tags: Quotes
Kyle was drunk. He was holding himself on his elbows above his own handsome death reflection in the bartop when I sat next to him.
“Beer,” I said to the bartender. I scooted my stool to the ledge.
Kyle looked up.
“Budweiser.”
Dazed, he managed all this in one motion: he dropped his chin, raised it again, swung it back and forth from the bartender to me. He was moving his head the way his brain felt.
“Hey,” he said. He was talking to me.
“Hey.”
“You here alone?” he asked.
I said I was. He studied me. His eyes were washed over with alcohol and the corners were streaked with broken bloodvessels. I noticed a dark shape under a shirt sleeve that was the edging of a tattoo. His T-shirt was too small, too tight, and high on his arms. He looked less drunk as he sat up. He was collecting himself to concentrate on speech.
“You’re not here with anyone?”
“No.” I told him why.
“You need a shot,” he said. “I’m buying.” Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Fiction
The items began collecting in 1994 when I decided to keep my first letter and some photographs from a girl I’d met one summer, which was also her name. The shoe box is filled with envelopes and corresponding letters written in girls’ handwriting, ticket stubs from concerts and baseball games, birthday cards signed by people I remember and some I don’t, and paper scraps with a young man’s wisdom written on them. The young man thought they were worth holding onto. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Thoughts on Writing
The old man’s afternoon began with an egg boiling, a ritual carried out at five minutes after five during the week and just after 4 on weekends. He had a small under-cabinet radio and he stood at the range and listened more than cooked, his mind half-listening and fully agreeing with conservative commentators. This was the routine: remove a pot from the metal drawer under the stove, turn the burner on so that it could heat, hold the pot under the faucet until it was a quarter full, then set it on the burner, watch the coils turn warm to orange, listen to the crackling under its metal bottom, and finally watch for the ripple through the water as it braced for something worse. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Free Writing
