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Author Archives: Kate Stover
“Fiction . . . is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web . . .”
Virginia Woolf continues, “attached ever so lightly, perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves.” It’s only when the web is … Continue reading
“It’s quite therapeutic going through the archives.”
Some memoirists want to record their history, others wish to tell great stories, and others, like Pamela Anderson, want to make sense of their lives. She is more interested in exploring “Who am I – when I’m alone?” than in … Continue reading
Posted in memoir
Tagged exploratory memoir, Love, memoir infused with poetry, Pamela, Pamela Anderson
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“When I wrote my book ‘On Writing Well,’ I had a definite model in mind. . . it was Alec Wilder’s book about music.”
A veteran of WWII, William Zinsser was one of the first to give American writers advice that might be described as “touchy-feely.” In his classic On Writing Well, he says that he is most “interested in the intangibles that produce … Continue reading
“Many years before, Abacus had come to the conclusion that the greatest of heroic stories have the shape of a diamond on its side.”
We are 500 pages into the story when this observation about the ideal structure for stories appears: “Beginning at a fine point, the life of the hero expands outward through youth as he begins to establish his strengths and fallibilities, … Continue reading
“Twelve years after Robin’s death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened.”
Even though I am not normally drawn to murder mysteries, I read this novel because Donna Tartt demonstrates how a writer can successfully break the rules. None of her characters are likeable; instead, they are suffering, or damaged, or limited, … Continue reading
Posted in fiction
Tagged Donna Tart, haunting novel, master class in fiction, The Little Friend
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“I am going to write about all this one day, I told her, and she smiled at me.”
This is the final sentence of Hua Hsu’s memoir. He is thanking his therapist for helping him deal with the death of his best friend. I imagine his therapist smiled because she knew that writing a memoir based on trauma … Continue reading
“Even as I write these words I am planning to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.”
We all know the feeling of being torn between wanting to take the time to think deeply and needing to get up to get something done. The tension between lofty ideas and everyday practicalities is a theme that runs through … Continue reading
Posted in poetry
Tagged coexistence of lofty and mundane, Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time
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“One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice –”
Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey” continues, “though the whole house / began to tremble / and you felt the old tug / at your ankles . . .” The journey she describes didn’t stop, even though it was “a wild … Continue reading
Posted in poetry
Tagged Mary Oliver, Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Change Your Life, The Journey
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“Remember: Your biggest stories will often have less to do with their subject than with their significance . . .”
William Zinsser continues, “. . .not what you did in a certain situation, but how that situation affected you and shaped the person you became.” Zinsser reminds us that readers don’t want to be impressed by your accomplishments. They don’t … Continue reading
Posted in memoir, non-fiction
Tagged humanity and warmth, On Writing Well, William Zinsser, write with integrity
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“Go north a dozen years on a road overgrown with vines to find the days after you were born.”
This remarkable first line of the poem “Sight” by Faith Shearin does three things: it provides a way to visualize a journey back in time along “a road overgrown with vines.” It includes an interesting slant rhyme with “vines” and … Continue reading
Posted in poetry
Tagged Faith Shearin, Orpheus, Sight, The past wants you back., Turning
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“His job wasn’t to recreate reality, but to immerse viewers in a kind of dream.”
When writing stories, the most important thing is to tell everything that happened, right? Well, maybe not. Hart argues that the author’s goal is not to describe the world in all its complexity. Rather, consider the advice offered by David … Continue reading
Posted in memoir, non-fiction
Tagged Jack Hart, let readers fill in the blanks, narrative nonfiction, Storycraft, writing scenes
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“So I decided to fashion a special kind of collage.”
How would a dissident playwright, who spent five years in prison before becoming the first president of Czechoslovakia, construct a memoir? If you imagine a creative architecture not seen before, you are right. It’s an engaging mix of observations, flashbacks, … Continue reading
Posted in memoir
Tagged architecture of memoir, dissident playwright, To the Castle and Back, Václav Havel
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“Kafka attended courses on the History of German Art, History of Architecture, History of Dutch Painting, and History of Christian Sculpture.”
Anne Tyler, John Updike, and Flannery O’Connor all made paintings and sketches in addition to writing fiction. As it turns out, so did Franz Kafka, who had a strong interest in art from his teens to his untimely death at … Continue reading