THOMAS WOLFE was born October 3, 1900 in Asheville, North Carolina. Appetite is a word often associated with this writer. He "bolted"...

"To unlock the heart is to know its secrets, or as close as we may come, to hear its soft inner voice, a thing love alone can achieve,

MY FONDNESS FOR MAY borders on idolatry. I admit that. Her touch is a breeze of sunlight. Her laughter, the pelt of a rose. That it is my...

IN SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD II, Richard's uncle, "old John of Gaunt," infirm, close to death, makes an observation on the value of parting...

IT WAS AN AGE WHEN PLAYS, poems, and letters were written in longhand. The pen was not just metaphor. Try to imagine a slower, more even...

IN JANUARY, I posted an article called REFLECTING 17: THE BIG EVENT. True to its title, it looked back on the events of 2017, or at least...

APPLAUSE. THERE IS NOTHING LIKE IT. Even the noblest among us, the most self-assured, modest, and self-deprecating have to admit that....

SUSAN SARANDON QUOTED HIM more than once in Bull Durham, a film about the great American pastime. He is mentioned with Thomas Wolfe in...

A FEW DAYS AGO, I received an email from a young writer, who, after reading my last post, BLOG TO BOOK: A REPRISE, asked me three...

WHEN I FIRST PRINTED IT OUT it was close to seven inches deep, a mountain of excess and overreach that would eventually become my first...

WRITES. It is a word that implies, first, an action. He writes. She writes. And so on. If we noun our verb, as Shakespeare was known to...

THERE ARE REASONS WHY YOU WRITE. Desire. Compulsion. Necessity. The desperate must, as in I must write-die-or-go-numb. All of the above?...

I CONSIDERED DRAFTING a post on alliteration, but rethought that strategy. Why draw attention to a device I choose most often to avoid?...

IN ACT 3 of Hamlet, Prince Hamlet offers instruction to a troupe of actors. Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you,...

WITHOUT RELEVANCE, history is little more than entertainment, a benign curiosity. History can be shy about giving up its secrets. It...

This is, or should be, item #1 in the writer's catechism. The shy, fabulous, satisfying, all-knowing point.

IF WRITING IS ANYTHING, IT IS A PERFORMANCE. The writer is the lone figure on the stage. A world may watch, judge, applaud, hiss, throw...

The infinite is liberated through the finite, that is, through the absolute completeness of a line.

Effective writing is all about fascination—being instructed and fed by it, following where it leads, submitting to its word choices . . .

THE DISCERNING WRITER, the writer who respects his audience and his craft will consider execution with the same weight, or gravity, he...