pamela marcantel

Tag: Writing

  • The Dreaded Blank Page

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    by

    Pamela Marcantel
    in

    So, you’re a writer.  See if this sounds familiar. You stare at it and stare at it, and it seems that it stares back, that blasted cursor winking at you, daring you to write something — a word, a phrase.  Anything. It’s at that point that you remember that you haven’t fed the cat in…

  • Painting with Words

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    by

    Pamela Marcantel
    in

    Many years ago when I was a university undergraduate, one of my roommates happened to be an art student.  Living in an apartment littered with paintbrushes, canvasses and other paraphenalia gave me an up-close appreciation of how an artist actually works that was miles apart from the detached overview of humanity’s long progression through the visual arts that I learned from my art history classes. One important, foundational…

  • The Hardest Thing About Writing…

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    by

    Pamela Marcantel
    in

    So.  After months, or even years, spent in daily/nightly toil on your book or screenplay, you’ve gotten it all polished and spiffy and the best it possibly can be. Perhaps you’ve spent many sleepless nights writing and rewriting it, sweating every word and switching passages or scenes around to make it all come together, and now you’ve done…

  • My Book for a Desert Island

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    by

    Pamela Marcantel
    in

    Success is as dangerous as failure.Hope is as hollow as fear.                                    –Lao-Tzu Way back in 1972 I found myself in a spiritual and psychological desert of sorts, at odds with everyone and everything around me and uncertain as to what direction, if any, I should take. It was at that precise moment that, like Howard Carter…

  • Fiction, Literary Criticism, and the Writing Thereof

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    Pamela Marcantel
    in

    Some years ago I had a conversation with a literature professor about writing in which he maintained that literary criticism is every bit as “creative” as the crafting of fiction.   I understood his point.   To take a text and tease meaning from it that perhaps no one else has gleaned, and then shape a well-conceived argument…

  • “The best lack all conviction…”

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    by

    Pamela Marcantel
    in

    Some of our clearest-seeing visionaries have been poets.  I love Yeats for his mysticism and his lyric Irish soul.  I know of no one like him today.

  • Bulwer-Lytton Contest 2011

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    by

    Pamela Marcantel
    in

    For fans of really bad writing:  Every year since 1982, the faculty of the Department of English at San Jose State University in California have sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, you might recall, was the author of the 1830 novel Paul Clifford, which gave the world the famous (or infamous) opening line, “It…