Category: writing
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Beautiful Sentences
He wondered now if everyone had a private life. He wondered if his wife had one. It was possible all these years that he had been alone, never knowing that a complete world existed and no one spoke of it. Ann Patchett, Bel Canto.
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Beautiful Sentences
“What’s your baby’s name?” She told him what Ezra called the baby. Elisabeth Fairchild, “A Heavy Breath” (The Missouri Review Summer 2011)
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Beautiful Sentences
A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death. Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.
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Beautiful Sentences
The only way to know tenderness is to dismantle it. Dianne Seuss, “White violet, not so much an image.” (The Missouri Review, Summer 2011).
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Beautiful Sentences
“While a murder went unsolved, everything was potentially significant, packed with secrets. The observers, like paranoiacs, saw messages everywhere. Objects could regain their innocence only when the killer was caught.” Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.
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What I learned while applying for an MFA
For two of the MFA programs to which I’ve applied, there was a requirement to submit a 3–4 page “craft essay.” I’d never really written such a thing before. As an undergraduate English major, writing tended to be one of two things: Either metacritical for my theory classes or explications d’texte for most of my…
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Managing omniscient viewpoint
The following is the craft essay I wrote for my MFA applications. Writing with an omniscient point of view provides a special challenge to the author. In a first-person or close third-person narration, the reader will view the action exclusively through a single character’s eyes, with the possibility of changing the point of view character…