 Red Room Writer Profile
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Nina Schuyler's Blog
July 3, 2010
- If you teach creative writing at the secondary or elementary or high school levels, here's a great resource: www.readwritethink.org. It's full of ideas to inspire writing, lesson plans, and afterschool activities.
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June 2, 2010
- Yale psychologist Paul Bloom writes that the main activity of Americans isn’t eating or drinking or having sex, but partaking in the pleasures of the imagination. Unfortunately not just reading (you knew that already), but movies, video games and TV (a whopping four plus hours a day for the average American). What is it about the imagination that trumps everything else? Why does the unreal hold ...
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May 9, 2010
- How? How to balance the diapers and the feedings, the playing with Lego or dolls or Tonka trucks with putting pen to page? A student of mine recently had a baby girl, and now the one-month old is doing what babies do, waking up every three hours. "How do I do it?" said my bleary-eyed student. "How do I keep writing?"Many women writers never attempted the delicate balancing ...
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May 8, 2010
- When you mention the second person, everyone rings out, almost in unison, Bright Lights Big City, by Jay McInery. Yes, the entire novel is written in second person to draw the reader in, even if she is kicking and screaming not to be in the big city, roaming the streets at some awful hour. But then you ask for another example. Silence. Because there's a risk with second person; the ...
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May 8, 2010
- My review of Jane Smiley's newest novel, Private Life. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/02/RVDL1D42CR.DTL
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April 26, 2010
- An unreliable narrator is severely limited, wearing blinders that distort and warp. The blinders may pertain to the narrator's morality, intellect, aesthetic, or experience, and probably dozens of other ways humans are limited. The result is the reader is receiving a lot of information that is untrustworthy, with the subtextual tension heightened because the author and reader see the ...
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April 12, 2010
- One of my short stories, "The Bob Society," was just published at www.themeadowlandreview.com. As I was looking over it again in its online layout pages, I remembered the spark for this story-- how a very large group of men gathered every Saturday to work on a stone wall. The construction went on for months, and so did the wrestling with this short story. I had no idea why it took ...
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March 4, 2010
- I've been teaching point of view this semester, and we recently finished Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrente. First published in Italy, the book is about a woman's descent into desperate loneliness after being abandoned by her husband with two children to care for alone. Ferrente offers several compelling techniques to expand beyond the sometimes claustrophobic (and in this novel's case, ...
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January 31, 2010
- John Lescroart, the author of the legal thriller, Treasure Hunt, reminds me of the importance of plot and the almost primal drive to answer the simple question--who committed the murder? You almost feel guilty succumbing to this question, but succumb you do. Lescroart also employs shifting points of view to expand the San Francisco landscape, moving from private detective, to politicians, to ...
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January 21, 2010
- I circle back to many short stories, but one that teaches me something each time I read it is "Death In the Woods" by Sherwood Anderson. It's a deceptively simple story with a first person reminiscent narrator recalling an old farmwoman who lived in his town when he was a boy and how she froze to death in the snowy woods. The language is precise, pared down, and intimate. "People ...
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January 17, 2010
- As the years tick by and I continue to write, I've been thinking about the longevity of a writer. How do you retain and ignite and re-ignite the passion to write? How do you dust yourself off from rejection and enter the imagination again, trusting that it is of value? In the periods when you are deeply involved in a novel, how do you sustain yourself? For years when someone has asked, ...
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December 8, 2009
- AbleMuse.com is such an interesting site, bringing together prose, poetry, art, and audio/sound. The fiction editor there is Redroom's author, Thaisa Frank. And, well, I've got a new short short there, too: "At the Opera House, 2009."
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November 26, 2009
- In nearly every creative writing class, the maxim is given: Show, don't tell. While telling is appropriate (a subject for another time), new brain research adds punch to the argument there is power in showing. A recent study found when a reader falls into the narrative dream of a story, the reader creates vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in the ...
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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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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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