I’m leaving Deloitte. I’m jumping off the cliff. It’s time to move on, because I have unfinished business. I buried a huge chunk of my life (and myself) in an unmarked hole in the woods. I need to return to that part of things to reclaim at least a portion of the person who I used to be.
A recap of my first visit to HippoCamp, a conference for creative nonfiction writers, in Lancaster PA. I also had the pleasure of leading a session, which made the experience all the better.
“Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.”
“Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.”
“Don’t worry about how pretty the writing sounds, how lilting it is, and the imagery, and the metaphor, all that. Most readers don’t care. It’s the people in your book that matter.”
“If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”
“The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.”
“As I write a story, I have to be open to all the possibilities of what these characters are thinking and doing and what might apply. For me, the best way to do this is writing longhand, the way I write the early drafts of a novel.”
Hammett’s stories were filled with unexpected turns yet had the inevitability of Greek tragedy.
His characters were nuanced to the point of complete moral ambiguity.
I was in the middle of reading Dinty W. Moore’s new book “To Hell With It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-inducing Inferno” from… Read more »