Ka-boom!  Now we’re in the landscape of the traditional novel writing process, creating scenes and identifying protagonist and antagonist, helpers and obstacles, motivating actions, coincidences, and catastrophes.  read more »

These days, it seems that contemporary literary culture celebrates the precocious achievements of gifted youth more often than seasoned later-in-life talents. I wonder, instead, if it isn’t a better idea to see creativity and art as part of the flow of life and our lives?  read more »

Gustave Flaubert, the brilliant French novelist, is alleged to have once said: “Be regular and ordinary in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Bourgeois is one of those words that was tossed about with abandon in the history class I took from a self-avowed Marxist my freshman college year.  read more »