Author: D. A. Hosek

  • Beautiful sentences

    Teacher: not a good sign. Few people go into this profession because they want to. They’re failed somethings—bank robbers, conductors, pilots, people who never found the way out of the educational system. A teacher of English to foreign students; even worse. Someone whose only employable trait is having been born in a country where the…

  • Beautiful sentences

    Magic means nothing to the blind. Ann Patchett, The Magician’s Assistant.

  • Thoughts on “Seven Tips from Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction”

    Do I dare to tackle advice from Ernest Hemingway on writing? Sure. Why not? 1. To get started, write one true sentence. Possibly the best known advice from Hemingway. And deceptive. What exactly makes a sentence true? And it seems that this is almost a recipe for writer’s block. I can see a disciple of…

  • Beautiful sentences

    The mind needs rules. Rules are the true rulers. Tibor Fischer, The Collector Collector.

  • Beautiful sentences

    Magicians all across the world managed quite well without assistants, but without magicians, the assistants were lost. Ann Patchett, The Magician’s Assistant.

  • Beautiful sentences

    I dreamed I was an artist; my medium was cottage cheese. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “For the Etruscans,” The Pink Guitar.

  • Beautiful sentences

    Boys who habitually stole from grocery stores. Boys who loved fire and burned up dry grass fields in summers, hay barns in winter. Boys who would not stop fighting, broke the noses and jaws of smaller boys. Mean, stupid boys who could not be taught the difference between right and wrong, never having seen it…

  • Beautiful sentences

    Given time his dreams might have come true, and he might have found himself with the woman he loved, but the road was too long and it brought him nowhere.  Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby.

  • Learning about my language use from a word cloud

    I happened to notice the picture below on the desktop of my MacBook: Glancing over the image, there are some obvious things that can be noted. The two biggest words are the name of my protagonist and his antagonist’s title. There’s an assortment of other character names and descriptive terms that all feel appropriate for…