 Red Room Writer Profile
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Nina Schuyler's Blog
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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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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September 29, 2009
- When workshopping became a verb, I took a closer look. What is this verb doing? What does it mean to have a story workshopped? As I've written in an earlier blog, some people have nothing good to say about this process. "...a combination of ritual scarring," writes Louis Menand in a June 8 & 15 The New Yorker article.When I gave a recent lecture to a group of students about what ...
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September 11, 2009
- In the June 8 & 15th issue of The New Yorker, Louis Menand opens with the statement, "Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem."The tone is hyperbolic, so perhaps he's trying for humor. But the rest of the article and the title, ...
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August 31, 2009
- I'm on a fifth revision of a short story. Or maybe seventh. I don't really keep track; rather, I keep diving in, plunging under until it feels right, reads right. I don't mean I'm fiddling with words or moving sentences around. I'm trying something different. Something a bit terrifying. Each time, I'm opening a new file and staring at a blank page (well, screen). I'm writing the whole thing ...
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August 22, 2009
- During a recent short story workshop, we were discussing word choice when one student confessed, "I never consult a thesaurus." Silence. But a door creaked open because what followed was a steady stream of admissions. "Me neither." "Never." "I don't even own one."Someone finally explained he felt a thesaurus would take away from his original intent and ...
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August 16, 2009
- August 16th. It's the birthday of William Maxwell, the former long-time editor at The New Yorker magazine. Born in 1908 in Lincoln, Illinois, he lived to the ripe age of 92. He wrote his entire life, publishing six novels, three collections of short fiction, an autobiographical memoir, a collection of literary essays and reviews, and a book for children. If you haven't read anything by ...
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August 3, 2009
- In the Aug. 3, 2009 issue of the New Yorker, Nicholson Baker gives an account of his encounter with a Kindle 2. "Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important-that it was an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization." He was open to the possibility of a new era of the book. "This could forever change the way I read...Maybe, I thought, if I ordered this ...
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July 27, 2009
- I was driving and happened to catch the end of an NPR interview with author, Nick Laird of Glover's Mistake."...And I try to write about the Internet and what it's done to reading and writing. And it's definitely changed. It changed the level of discourse. You know, I've been trying to read Henry James and Dr. Johnson recently and the complexity and the subtlety of the syntax, I find ...
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July 20, 2009
- Fifteen years ago, long before the Internet blossomed, then, like a morning glory, threaded its way into nearly every aspect of life, technology investor and pundit Esther Dyson predicted, "Creators will have to fight to attract attention and get paid."Copyrights be damned because creators "will operate in an increasingly competitive marketplace where much of the intellectual ...
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July 17, 2009
- In our book club, we were reading J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello when one of the members chimed in that she'd met Coetzee. He used to teach at the same university. "Cold, a cold man," she let everyone know. "Barely said a word at parties. He came across as not really liking people. He definitely hated chit chat."I'm a Coetzee fan. I appreciate his mission throughout his ...
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July 11, 2009
- After teaching creative writing for years, I've found it's the endings of short stories that cause the most trouble. The trouble is of all sorts: the overdramatic, shouting-from-the-rooftop epiphany; the quiet whimper of something, but the reader is not quite sure what; the voice trying to sound like an aria, but feeling strained, perhaps even suffering a cold. In nearly every workshop I've ...
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June 30, 2009
- It's a Sunday afternoon and time has slipped out the door, along with chores and schedules and things that must get done. I'm fiddling around in the kitchen, doing-- I don't know what. My six-year-old son is sitting at the kitchen table with his good friend. I've folded white pages of paper and they are creating their own books. An array of 50 markers of every possible color are scattered ...
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June 24, 2009
- For four years, National Public Radio ran a series called, "This I Believe," in which people generously offered the personal beliefs and core values that guided their daily lives. It's a fascinating exercise, not only for examining your life, but for unearthing the underpinnings of your writing. This past weekend, poet Brian Teare asked a room full of writers to carry out this ...
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