By Nicholas O’Connell Talk about prescient. Lawrence Wright’s new novel, The End of October, appeared in April, 2020, right as COVID-19 exploded across the U.S. and world. A medical thriller, the novel tells the story of a fictional pandemic caused …
Review of Lawrence Wright’s Novel The End of October Read More »
THE PERFECT PITCH: STORY IDEAS IN WRITING CLASSES Narrative writers organize their books and shorter pieces in terms of a story or chronology, probably the oldest and most compelling way of relating information. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. …
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In her essay collection, Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor talks about writing as a habit of art. I discuss this approach in The Writer’s Workshop talk on The Writing Life, on Wednesday, Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. in room 221 at …
If you love to travel like I do, you’ve probably found the last six months a challenging time. After canceling my Travel Writing class in Spain and an assignment to ski in Austria, I have hunkered down at home to …
In these tumultuous times, it seems hard to imagine how things can return to normal. How can we get through Covid, police brutality, protests, riots, high unemployment and general malaise? One of the best ways to find hope in dark …
Summer Reads for Tumultuous Times from The Writer’s Workshop Read More »
Book Promotion During a Pandemic Promoting a book is challenging enough in normal times. Doing this during a pandemic makes it even more problematic. Nevertheless, it can be done successfully, according to Molly Woolbright, the publicist at Sasquatch Books, …
If there’s any silver lining to this Covid 19 scourge, it may be that people now have time to read and write. Some people are writing about how their lives have changed. Others are writing about anything but Covid, relishing …
Scenic writing animates some of the most moving, satisfying, sophisticated works of literature as I teach in my Seattle writing classes and other writing classes. It quickly brings readers into the story because it helps create a world, a world …
I take great pride in seeing the students in my Seattle writing classes succeed. One of these students, Jeff Smoot, wrote the memoir, Hang Dog Days, which recently earned a runner up for the Banff Mountain Festival Book Award and …
Jeff Smoot Reads at The Writer’s Workshop Seattle Writing Classes Read More »
2020 Pacific Northwest Book Awards Shortlist Announced The Pacific Northwest Book Sellers association just announced its 2020 Book Awards Shortlist, selected by a committee of independent booksellers from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska, a non-profit trade association that …
“One false word, one extra word, and somebody's thinking about how they have to buy paper towels at the store.”
Patricia Marx
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
Jane Austen
Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years.
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
V.S. Naipaul
