Blog Posts for Nina Schuyler

Lawyerly Thinking and Writing Fiction

Nina Schuyler — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:07:50 -0800

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 ...

Multitasking and Writing

Nina Schuyler — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:34:03 -0700

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 ...

Subtext

Nina Schuyler — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:14:01 -0700

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, ...

The Process of Workshop

Nina Schuyler — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:40:37 -0700

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 ...

In Praise of Creative Writing Workshops

Nina Schuyler — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:02:04 -0700

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, ...

Revision As a Blank Screen

Nina Schuyler — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:23:23 -0700

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 ...

Praising the Thesaurus

Nina Schuyler — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 21:44:24 -0700

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 ...

William Maxwell's Birthday

Nina Schuyler — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 15:47:57 -0700

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 ...

Mimetic Theory and Kindle

Nina Schuyler — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 13:05:15 -0700

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 ...

Slow Language Movement

Nina Schuyler — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 15:10:01 -0700

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 ...