"Writers struggle to get the right words down in the right order, to put every comma, or nearly every comma, in its proper place; and readers follow the writers' final sequence of words and commas as printed on the page," Michael Lydon writes, "but what happens between writer and reader is far more amorphous, more emotional than the precision needed for the process would suggest."  Continue reading...

Calling all writers! Here's a word to the wise:

Self-publish!

Sounds so good, let's say it again:

Self-publish, self-publish, self-publish!  Continue reading...

In physics class my high school junior year, I learned little, and of that little I remember little. Our brilliant though irascible teacher, Mr. Whitney, did, however, impress me with one fact of nature I've never forgotten.  Continue reading...

On the Sunday morning of Hurricane Irene, I sat in a long line of folding chairs set up in a barn-like rehearsal hall at the Peterborough Players, a fine summer theater deep in the New Hampshire woods. Before me, an eager troupe of actors and musicians, still in sweatshirts and blue jeans, worked their way through Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, their first full run-through before an invited audience.  Continue reading...

Writing, a form of speech, may be read aloud; writers of merit develop personal voices we hear speaking through the text. Yet much prose lies flat on the page and speaks to our eyes more than our ears.  Continue reading...

Whenever we read fiction, a three-way bond springs to life between the writer, the reader, and the characters. Writer and reader are real human beings, the characters are imaginary, but to write a believable story, the writer must convince the readers that the characters are as human as he or she and we are, and draw us into a conversation in which facts of life may be compared and foibles confessed.  Continue reading...

Words have meaning, right? Sure they do, we all know that! We certainly use words, spoken or written, at all hours of the day and night to convey what we mean to other people. We know the meanings of many words, and if we don't know what a word means -- heterolysis, for instance -- we can look up its meaning in the dictionary: "the destruction of cells of one species by enzymes derived from cells of a different species."  Continue reading...