Authors Electric

  Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose This book was recommended to me by the director of a creative writing program here in Amsterdam. She thought it might help me reacquaint myself with the various craft terms I’d need to know when I start teaching in the spring. Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose turned out to be so much more. As a reader, it crystallized for me the reason I love books.  As a writer, it offered real life tips. And as a wannabe teacher, it gives me the courage to think I’ll make it someday. on reading For many of us, reading has become a chore. We skim through reports, emails, the news feed hoping to digest as much information as quickly as we can. And even when we read for pleasure, we might skip pages and paragraphs to cut to the chase, find out whodunit, answer the who-what-when questions in our mind. But when we were kids, reading was different. As Francine Prose reminds us:   "We all begin as close readers. Even before we ...

Motherhood by Sheila Heti The bookshop is small but well-stocked. It occupies a narrow windowless space like most places in this part of Amsterdam. At the far end of the shop sits Sheila Heti, waiting to talk about her latest novel, Motherhood . We join the crowd. We are four women in a sea of female faces. Three of us are mothers; one is not. I am one of the few women in the room past the child-bearing age. Whether a woman is still sexually productive seems relevant when Motherhood is about an unnamed protagonist wrestling with the decision to have a child. Heti and her protagonist share many of the same characteristics. Both are writers, around 40 years old, living in Toronto. Both have mothers who put their work ahead of child-rearing. Many reviewers have assumed that Motherhood is a very public accounting of Heti’s private decision. But that wasn’t Heti’s goal. Her interest is in language and how we choose to speak about the choices we make....

Bruce Nauman, Double Poke in the Eye II, Tate Modern. Photo credit: Karen Kao A while ago, a student asked me to talk about writing dialogue. She felt that her own dialogue was stilted, created solely for the purpose of completing her writing exercise for the week. I said something vague and probably wholly unsatisfactory, although this student was too polite to say so. I think I mumbled something like: use dialogue when it’s the most efficient way to convey your information. When the reader needs to hear the words coming out of the mouth of one of your characters. After class, I went home and started looking at my writing books. As I had hoped, there were plenty of better answers than my flubbed attempt. So here’s what I learned about writing dialogue. Impossible Dialogue Image source: HarperCollins Legend has it that Truman Capote could eavesdrop on a conversation on the street, rush back to his hotel room, and transcribe that conversation verbatim....

This week marks the start of my third term of teaching creative writing at the International Writers’ Collective , a creative writing community here in Amsterdam. It seemed like a good occasion to revisit a blog post I wrote in December 2017, wondering out loud in truly Hamlet-like fashion, whether I should be teaching at all. My existential doubts stemmed from a question Francine Prose asks straight up in Reading Like a Writer : Can the love of language be taught? Can a gift for storytelling be taught? … The answer is no. What then was I expected to teach? Image source: Pixabay the first time When I was in college, I worked as a tutor. One semester, I taught math to local high school students. Another semester, I’d help premed students learn to write an essay.  The latter was a deeply painful experience because it turns out that, in order to write you need to be able to think. When all you’re trying to do is pass your freshman humanities class, then writing is...

No, for heaven's sake, I don't mean this: And no, Lev Butts, I don't mean this: This   is the hot sexy thing with your lips: That's right,  move  'em when you read! I don't know when exactly I started to question my own reading speed...or my habit of sounding the words in my head, savoring rhythms and diction. Nor can I recall when I first felt ashamed at helplessly reading some sections aloud. I knew that others read far more quickly than I -- some with perfect recall. I read a book on speed reading not long after college, stung by a stranger's cruel remark about my lipful reading style. I recall trying to master the basic principles: not sounding the words...silently ingesting lines, then paragraphs of type. I never entirely abandoned my efforts or enjoyed any real success. Reading in this fashion was pleasureless to me, while reading my own way brought equal measures of pleasure and shame. Ah, but I remember my emancipation after r...