Recent Essays and Articles
My weekly Substack newsletter: Intimations: A Writer’s Discourse
How we write is how we live. And how we live is how we write. A dose of creative writing for the soul.
Essays on Medium
I write essays about an array of topics related to writing and the creative process on Medium. I’ve written about such things as Vanquishing Fear Through Your Curiosity, The Secret to Telling Your Story: Embrace Vulnerability, and Building a Creative Community.
What to Read When You Want to Read about Sin
My stories in All the Comfort Sin Can Provide form themselves around people wrestling with who they are, who they want to be, and in this wrestling, they naturally slip (or fall). They lunge in pursuit of meaning and grace, or just the solace of pleasure, and they might hurt themselves or hurt others in those lunges, but to be a saint, you have to first be a sinner. As Jung said, inside of every alcoholic there’s a seeker who got on the wrong track.
To read novels is to engage in a lifelong inquiry into sin, so I put together this list of some of the books I’ve read over the years that have been instruction manuals of such lunges for me—and guides in the writing of this collection.
Life By the Bay: A Moveable Feast That Moved When I Wasn’t Looking
To live in the Bay Area is to wonder whether or not to leave.
That was going to be my first sentence of my story. Then I was going to tell you about the nearly thirty-year conversation I’ve had with my wife, the writer Heather Mackey, about whether we should move to a place more hospitable to a couple of writing-addicted people, a place where you don’t have to duct tape your finances together to live, a place that’s perhaps more pastoral and certainly less pressured.
13 Ways of Looking at Flash Fiction
LitHub, Aug. 21, 2020
An interviewer once asked me, “If flash fiction were an animal, which animal would it be?” I considered a chicken because you can peck at the stories. Perhaps a badger because short shorts sometimes have to be more tenacious than their larger brethren. I thought a fish was apt because tiny stories often swim together. I almost decided upon a cat because a cat can fit perfectly in your lap, and even as you pet it and listen to its purrs, it stares at you with a mysterious menace. …
Rejection’s Gift: Divine Dissatisfaction
Poets & Writers, January/February, 2020
We writers tend not to give rejection the love or respect that it deserves. We speak ill of it, as if it’s a malevolent demon, a destructive force, an uninvited guest that ruins our party. We revile it. We curse it. We reject it. Because rejection is a damnable, despicable thing that seemingly aims to only hurt and hinder. It gives us no warmth, no love, and we writers need love; in fact, we don’t just need love, we need love in bounteous, fulsome heaps. We want editors to gush over our words like a teenager with a crush. We want readers to slather us with adoration.
Getting Through the Muddle of the Muddy Middle
Swoon Reads, November 14, 2018
I was recently asked whether it’s more difficult to write the beginning or the ending of a novel. My answer? Neither. The most difficult part of a novel to write is the middle—popularly known as the “muddy middle,” or just the “muddle.”
Write Your Novel with These Tips for Conquering NaNoWriMo
Goodreads, October 24, 2018
Studies to discover the key ingredients of NaNoWriMo success have been conducted by data scientists, wizards, alchemists, two plumbers from Toledo, a rodeo rider, and a winemaker from France, to name just several. In our endless search to find the recipe for success, we held debates to find the definitive answer, but we’ve concluded that because everyone is different, there is no single formula to cross the finish line.
The Writer as Seducer
Writer’s Digest, February 2018
“Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?” The French literary critic Roland Barthes poses this question in 1973’s The Pleasure of Text, and I find myself pondering it frequently-not only to understand the nature of desire, but as a fiction writer who aims to create stories full of suspense and intrigue.
Desire forms itself around hints and signs, those feints and teases that keep us captivated by the mere suggestion of future fulfillment. Indeed, it’s like living in the tension of a riveting story, where suspense is created by an author’s loving flirtations-a game of seduction meant to draw the reader in through a coil of thrills and dodges. It’s an erotic relationship in a sense-the author calculating just how much and when to touch or reveal.
Imagination Under Pressure
Poets & Writers, January/February, 2018
There’s an old saying that if you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them. My limitations can feel as if the walls of my writing life are closing in on me, but I’ve started to see the constraints of my life as advantages in disguise. I’ve observed many a person with time on their hands fritter it away, and then have the audacity to complain about not having enough time to get anything done. I’ve come to realize that our imagination doesn’t necessarily flourish in the luxury of total freedom, where it can become a flabby and aimless wastrel. Our imagination thrives when pressure is applied, when boundaries are set.
Fortify Your New Year’s Resolutions
terribleminds, January 25, 2018
I have a theory: I think most people give up on their resolutions because they focus too much on the uncomfortableness of the what they aspire to do—whether it’s sweating on a stationary bike or over their laptop—instead of focusing on the why they want to do it. Think about it. Why should you wake up and write when you could immerse yourself in endless entertainments literally available at your fingertips? Why not just binge watch shows on Netflix and eat handfuls of gummie bears?
NaNoWriMo Pep Talk: The Muddy Middle
IngramSpark, November 19, 2017
When I was a boy, I watched a lot of old movies on TV, especially westerns. In nearly every western, there was a crucial moment when a character would accidentally step into quicksand. They’d try to lift their feet, but each time they did so, they’d sink deeper. They’d start to panic and flail all about, but the more they’d try to escape, the deeper they would sink.
How to Beat Writer’s Block
IngramSpark, November 9, 2017
I don’t believe in the notion of writer’s block. I think it’s too easy to end up building a twisted shrine to it—to proclaim the affliction, then festoon one’s writing life with it, saying, “I’m blocked,” over and over again, as if abdicating responsibility for creating the blockage and waiting for magical bolts of inspiration to come down from the sky and unstopper it all (which only happens in the movies, right?). …
Why You ARE the Creative Type
Goodreads, November 1, 2017
Each year, I talk to hundreds of people who have perfected a peculiar and disturbing art: the art of telling themselves why they can’t jump in and write the novel of their dreams.
“I’ve never taken any classes. I don’t have an MFA.”
“I have a lot of ideas for stories, but I’m not a real writer.”
Or, worst of all, they say, “I’m not a creative type.”
Special Edition: Grant Faulkner on his most treasured book
San Francisco Chronicle, October 15, 2017
I’d just been dumped in the dramatic manner that only a 22-year-old can be. My salve, as unhealthy as it might have been, was to immerse myself in tragic novels with characters careening through the fiery hells of rejection. The more self-destructive, the better. The best in this genre turned out to be Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, which tells the story of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic British consul in Mexico who tries to reunite with his estranged wife when she returns on the Day of the Dead in 1938. …
Take a Story Field Trip
NaNoWriMo Blog, October 13, 2017
One of the mistaken perceptions of writers is that all of their writing gets done at their desks, that plots, characters, and the telling details that make a story blossom into life just flow out of a writer’s mind and onto the page. As much as I hesitate to lure you away from maximal word production (because most of my pep talks encourage you to just keep writing in one way or another), one of the wonderful side benefits of being a writer is not just the places you get to go in your imagination, but the real places you get to go to explore your story in all of its nuances. …
One Hundred Reasons Why I Write
National Writing Project, October 12, 2017
I once told a friend that there were at least 100 good reasons why I wrote. But after I said that, I wondered if I was exaggerating. It turns out I wasn’t. Here’s why I write. …
Why Writing Novels Matters
Nerdy Book Club, October 6, 2017
When I was a teenager, growing up in a small Iowa town, I was a reader, and I was a writer, but it never once occurred to me to write a novel. Novels were big things that other people wrote. Adults. People who lived in New York City. People who had gone to war or lived exotic lives. I wrote in my journal, and I wrote the occasional poem or short story, but writing something as big and ambitious as a novel just wasn’t something teens did. …
A Tiny Essay on Writing Tiny Stories
14 Hills
Even God knows the story can’t be told in its entirety. A profligacy of words soon disorients. Rococo flourishes end as fulsome decadence. It is absence that spawns the fundamental mystery of life. Subtle gestures, dashing glances, unspoken words whisper through our days, a beguiling puzzle. …
Poets & Writers City Guide: San Francisco Bay Area
Poets & Writers, January 2017
When I first came to San Francisco as a young English major during my spring break in 1987, I knew nothing of the Bay Area’s literary history. I didn’t know that the young bootstrapping Jack London had determinedly chiseled himself into a writer in nearby Oakland, or that Allen Ginsberg’s famous “Howl” reading had riled the literary world (and its censors) in San Francisco in the 1950s. I hadn’t yet read Dashiell Hammett’s noir novels, nor Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (Ramparts Press, 1968), nor Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (Harper & Row, 1978). And I had no idea that Gertrude Stein had said, “There’s no there there,” about Oakland (if only she could see the “there there” now). …
How a Month of NaNoWriMo Can Lead to a Lifetime of Better Writing
Writer’s Digest, November/December 2016
Every writer who becomes a master goes through a training ground, whether formal or self-imposed, and there’s no better boot camp for writers than the rollicking, spirited grind of National Novel Writing Month. With the heady goal of writing 50,000 words in just 30 days, NaNoWriMo not only teaches valuable approaches to the creative process, but critical habits to becoming a successful novelist.
Naked (On the Page) and Afraid
Writer’s Digest, July/August 2015
Good writing requires courage—first to give voice to the truth at the heart of every story, and then to share it with a world of readers. The only way to achieve that is through an openness of spirit that can feel dangerous—or even be dangerous. Here’s why embracing vulnerability could unlock important doors for you, your writing, and your career. …
Mini Might
The Writer, July 2015
I have a theory about the variety of storytelling brains – brains wired with unique proclivities, strengths and weaknesses, as if from birth. There are “plot brains,” brains that immediately seize a character’s conflict and visualize the character bounding and zigzagging through a series of actions, overcoming obstacles and climbing toward a telling reversal or a poignant recognition. And then there are brains like mine that see a character mainly in a single situation, a dramatic one, certainly, but one that is as isolated as a scene from an Edward Hopper painting, unconnected from what’s next and perhaps even from what went before. …
Executive Director as Creative Magician?
CompassPoint
I was recently on a panel of executive directors, and I was asked, “How do you bring magic into the workplace?”
I might have blushed with embarrassment. My first thought, was, “Um, I’m not sure if I do bring magic into the workplace.” I’m not necessarily a geyser of inspiration, at least not on an ordinary workday. I don’t preach, swagger, or sing. I occasionally read a motivational quote or two, but only occasionally. …
Writing Flash Fiction: Telling a Story with What’s Left Out
Writer’s Digest, May/June 2015
We are generally taught to build our stories with more words. To plumb a character’s backstory. To delve into the sensory minutia of a scene. To spin the connective tissue that builds a story’s dramatic trajectory.
As a novelist, I’ve certainly practiced what I call an aesthetic of “maximalist comprehensiveness.” I strap together crisscrossing tentacles of story lines and fill the capacious spaces of a novel’s pages with layers of details. I almost always write with a sense of expanding, of putting bulk on my story’s bones. …
More Ideas Faster: Writing With Abandon
Poets & Writers, January 2015
A few years ago I grappled with a simple question I had never before bothered to ask myself: Did I decide on my writing process, or did it decide on me? Despite an adult lifetime of reading innumerable author interviews, biographies of artists, and essays on creativity, I realized I’d basically approached writing the same way for years. And I didn’t remember ever consciously choosing my process, let alone experimenting with it in any meaningful way. …
Going Long. Going Short.
New York Times Draft Blog
I’ve always wanted to go long, as in writing that big behemoth of a saga called the “Great American Novel,” no matter the absurdity of questing after such a holy grail. I thought the best way to understand the endless ribbons of America’s highways, the oozing boundaries of our suburbia and the rhythms of life they induce in us, resided in an ever expansive aesthetic of maximalist comprehensiveness, full of crisscrossing tentacles of story lines and sentences bursting with syntactic curlicues. …
What Makes NaNoWriMo Work: Breaking Down the Mythology of the Solitary Writer
Writer’s Digest, November/December 2014
Pause a moment and reflect on your image of a writer. Did you think of a writer sitting in a room alone with wadded-up paper strewn around a wastebasket? A writer conjuring a story while taking a pensive walk alone? Or perhaps a writer banging away at a keyboard in the throes of inspiration?
We tend to view writers as solitary figures, dreamy or anguished creatures immersed in their work or questing for the necessary peace to write—searching for “a room of one’s own,” as Virginia Woolf put it. “Writer” and “solitary” practically go together like “rock” and “group.” …
Be Deluded. Be Grand.
Rhizomatic Ideas
The phrase “delusions of grandeur” generally carries a negative connotation. It connotes one who’s out of touch with reality. One who is arrogant. One who expects the royal treatment.
It can be all of those things, but I want to put a twist on such notions. I posit that a writer needs to seize delusions of grandeur when they strike, to even nurture those delusions and view them as the rare and precious gems they are. …
Serialization as Writing Process
JukePop
One of the biggest challenges a writer faces is moving forward. Sounds simple, but it’s all too easy to get caught in a condition I’ll call “the endless loop of perfection.” I have suffered from such a malady. The part of writing I like best is the shaping, shaving, and sculpting involved in revision. …
The Mad Dash Through a Novel
Grammar Girl Blog
I have a confession—I overuse the em-dash. That sentence, in fact, would have been better written with a colon. Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing—I mean, as executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)—an organization that espouses the notion of “writing with abandon” for 30 days each November to create a 50,000-word novel—dashes come in quite handy. …
Applying to a Writers Residency: An Expert Breakdown of the Requirements
Poets & Writers
Every writer I know craves one thing: a peaceful period of uninterrupted time dedicated to writing. A room of one’s own, in other words, with maybe some meals thrown in and a little pocket money. Or even just the room. …
100-Word Stories: Writing with Gaps
Brevity
Writers are presumed to be lovers of words. They’re called wordsmiths, praised for their lyricism, and celebrated for capturing telling details. Stories are built through text, after all, so we strive to learn the fine art of vivid verbs, hone an ear for dialogue, and absorb new vocabulary. These are all valuable tools, but one of the most important tools of writing can be neglected by attending only to the words of a story. I call that tool “minding the gaps.” …
Poet Laureate Kay Ryan: Poet as Teacher, Teacher as Poet
The National Writing Project
Although Kay Ryan has kept her life as a teacher separate from her life as a writer, her teaching and poetry share similarities. They both focus on fundamentals and a search for the possibilities of expression within the limits of small spaces. …
The Last Book I Loved: Reality Hunger
The Rumpus
At the heart of Reality Hunger is Shields’s critique of the literary world’s rather stodgy proclivity to privilege the traditional realist novel as the mirror of reality—a representation of reality that has held firm since the 19th century, despite all of the world’s changes. …