The Quivering Pen

Of all the books I read in 2019 (105 and counting, as of this writing), perhaps the one that surprised me the most was Dad’s Maybe Book ...

               When I woke up this morning           I found I was writing a poem in my dream           and the only line I could hold...

I’ve been enjoying the latest issue of Glimmer Train Stories , reading it in small doses each day so I can stretch out the experience. (...

Last night, as part of my five-year plan to read the Essentials , I started Main Street , Sinclair Lewis’ 1920 satire of small-town life...

Opinions: just like certain anatomical parts, we all have ’em. I was recently invited by the good folks at Bloom to dispense a few. Sp...

While this Monday space is normally reserved for words of wisdom from present-day writers, I thought I'd take a week's break from t...

Today's inspiring quote comes from legendary choreographer Agnes de Mille by way of Dani Shapiro's equally inspiring book about ...

I had the pee-my-pants pleasure of meeting Tim O'Brien at the Texas Book Festival this past weekend.  I'm here to tell you he...

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub....

       When fishing in a large lake, it's okay to troll for long periods of time.  If you don't get a bite, though, it might be a...

"I wrote six unpublished novels, and too many unwanted short stories to count, before All About Lulu was published.  I physically du...

From one of the many tomes I had read on the “art of fiction,” I had got the idea that, like Athena, the goddess of wisdom who sprouted ful...

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered ...

“Place is important to my writing, and one of my best practices is to get in the car and drive. Images from those drives—a janitor in a lig...

This might be the only time you see Michael Cunningham and Jodi Picoult together in the same blog post here at The Quivering Pen, but I...

( Infinite Jest ) pretty much reconfigured my sense of what's possible in a novel, which is to say it made clear there's very little...

Over at Wordswimmer , Caroline Leavitt talks about the writing process and how to keep on going during dry patches, muscling through self-do...

The stories get me writing–the other ones that I have in a notebook full of ideas: I want to get to them, and do them well, and bring them ...

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that ...

On my computer, I have a file called "quotes," something I've maintained for years. Kibbles and bits from books, magazines, an...