“Jean-Paul Sartre said that it takes 20 years for a writer to objectively read his own work as his audience does….” That vantage may offer the writer “the delightful experience of encountering himself as a stranger.” cited by Charles Johnson, author of MIDDLE PASSAGE, in a recent NY Times interview. For some of us, this may not…
Several months ago, my editor at Livingston Press asked for a few paragraphs telling how I came to write A Stone for Bread. Here’s what I wrote: My initial idea for a novel usually comes from a character or place, a striking image, a question to which I’d like an answer or some intriguing moment from history. But once…
In the spring of 1972, I was teaching Freshman English three nights a week at Essex County College in Newark, New Jersey. This was five years after the race riots that destroyed much of inner city Newark and led to a number of deaths. Essex College was situated in downtown Newark, and even after five…
Warning: Never delete that page you hate! Or a character who’s all wrong! Or trash a manuscript in disgust! Certainly, we writers all have those moments. And yes, I delete lines here and there, even paragraphs but almost never entire pages of a manuscript I’m working on. Instead, I cut the passages I’m unhappy with or that aren’t right for a particular…
In my first novel Absolution, I set chapters in Vietnam, although I have never been there. In A Stone for Bread, I recreate the World War II Mauthausen concentration camp, a site I have never visited (it exists today as a memorial to those imprisoned there). As a consummate researcher, I find personal observations of the…
Just before we took off for a 10 day vacation, I read, edited and returned the final set of pdfs (page proofs) for my forthcoming novel A Stone for Bread. This was the second reading and like the first was a process that can be both exciting and tedious — exciting to see the novel actually in…
The Veteran He was a handsome young man, tall and blonde, older than the other Freshmen in my Composition and Lit class. We were probably close in age. I was a grad student in the 1960s. He was a Vietnam vet who had served with the Special Forces. I doubt I would ever have…
Reimagining. That’s what we fiction writers do. We take the stuff of our lives and reimagine it as fictional people, places and stories. Often our places aren’t fictional, but even familiar places may need a writer’s creative touch. In my novel Absolution, Maggie and Richard live in a Back Bay townhouse on Boston’s Marlboro Street, a very…
I stopped by the frame rental house to invite him to an event planned for kids in his inner city neighborhood, children of Southeast Asian refugee families. I knew the boy, a seventh grader. He’d come to several programs run out of a nearby Methodist church. But I had never been to his house. When he…
I’ve been asked this question a number of times about the protagonist in my novel Absolution. I doubt this is an unusual question for fiction writers, especially when a major character shares the author’s gender, place and time. And it’s a question that can be asked in several ways, such as, how much of you…