Nina Schuyler's Blog

• Lawyerly Thinking and Writing Fiction

  November 13, 2009

  •   When I walked away from the legal profession and stepped into the world of creative writing, I thought that would be the end of legal thinking and analysis. I was wrong.While the primary subject of fiction is human emotion, values and beliefs, the way to convey that can benefit from thinking like a lawyer. What do I mean? First there is the element of causation, critical to legal thinking and ...
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• Multitasking and Writing

  October 18, 2009

  •   A recent study found that media multitaskers are actually less productive than they think.  Not only that, "heavy multitaskers" have trouble tuning out distractions and switching tasks compared with those who multitask less. And there's evidence that multitasking may weaken cognitive ability.Dr. Clifford Nass at Stanford University, who did the study, defines a media multitasker as ...
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• Subtext

  October 3, 2009

  •   What does your character NOT want to think about?I love this question because it takes you directly to the heart of subtext, that subterranean realm, which is the story itself, the real story. Subtext is what makes story feel so much larger than what's on the page. It's the implied, the suggested, the unspoken. As the poet Louise Gluck writes in Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry, ...
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