https://mgcobb.com/2021/01/02/mrs-dalloway-and-head-hopping/ Michael Cunningham is an American novelist and screenwriter best known for his 1998 Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Hours. The December 23, 2020 issue of The New York Times ran a wonderful essay by Cunningham, Virginia Woolf’s Literary Revolution, about Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Given my thirty-year fascination with, and devotion to, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group in general, I was eager to read Cunningham’s piece. He didn’t let me down. I could go on and on about the many reasons I love Virginia Woolf’s body of work, and I highly recommend Cunningham’s piece. However, I would like…

https://mgcobb.com/2020/12/20/i-write-in-service-to-my-characters/ “Never allow the integrity of your own way of seeing things and saying things to be swamped by the influence of a master, however great.” George P. Lathrop George Parsons Lathrop. Ever heard of him? Probably not. Most people haven’t. But everybody’s heard of his father-in law. In fact, countless high school and college students in this country still read the man’s writing every year, and have so for over a century. You see, in 1871, at the age of twenty, George Lathrop married a woman three months his senior named Rose Hawthorne, the youngest child of Nathaniel. Yes…

https://mgcobb.com/2020/12/16/nabokov-and-the-task-of-writing/ Okay. I admit it. The abiding controversy surrounding Lolita notwithstanding, I’m a huge fan of Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Of his considerable body of work, perhaps my favorite novel is Pale Fire. The story centers on John Shade, a reclusive poet who writes a 999-line poem about his life and speculation of what will befall him when he ultimately leaves this earth. The novel includes extensive commentary by his crazy neighbor, Charles Kinbote, who encourages him to write about his, Kinbote’s, own homeland, the kingdom of Zembla. Lest I give away too much of the story, I’ll refrain from…

https://mgcobb.com/2020/12/16/wabi-sabi-and-the-craft-of-writing/ I don’t begin a piece, whether a short story or a novel, with some lofty notion of an ideal plotline that takes the reader through an exposition, a crescendo and a climax, a resolution and a denouement. Some authors write this way, and I respect them for it. My approach is a little different, inspired by the ancient Japanese principle of wabi-sabi, which celebrates the beauty of imperfection. My characters, with all their flaws and imperfections, their tics and eccentricities, their peccadillos and peculiarities — they are the agents who tell me what to write, in what direction the…

COMING IN 2021 https://mgcobb.com/2020/12/14/herald/ Susan Herald moved to Atlanta to make a new life for herself, one far away from the privilege and upper-middle-class comfort she left behind. But her plans for a new start were not meant to be. Early one fall morning in 1970, her nude, bullet-riddled body was discovered on a construction site in a run-down part of town, her life cut short senselessly and inexplicably. This is a true story. It is the account of the life and death of Susan Herald, fictionalized as “Kathleen” in a recent short piece (Kathleen). At the time I wrote…

https://mgcobb.com/2021/02/18/how-to-create-compelling-characters/

It’s not only writer’s intuition. Use personality psychology to create just the right blend of surprise and believability by Kira-Anne Pelican Need to know It’s first thing in the morning, I’ve plenty to do but I can’t stop thinking about Nicole Kidman’s character from the American TV series I watched last night, The Undoing. It’s a psychological thriller, and Kidman was mesmerising. When written well, characters seize our attention and compel us to engage. They stay in our minds long after we’ve closed the pages of our novel, binge-watched the entire box set, or exited the auditorium. We mull…

https://mgcobb.com/2021/02/08/mass-energy-and-how-literature-transforms-the-dead-weight-of-being-jeanette-winterson-on-why-we-read/

“Books read us back to ourselves… The escape into another story reminds us that we too are another story. Not caught, not confined, not predestined.” “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us,” Kafka wrote to his childhood friend just as he was setting out on a life of making and honing axes of words. I have always been struck by his metaphor — by both the exquisite truth of its tenor and the awful violence of its vehicle. A good book is indeed a profound transformation and, yes, there can be a violence to…

https://mgcobb.com/2021/02/05/what-we-get-wrong-about-joan-didion/

In the spring of 1967, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, freelance writers married to each other and living in Los Angeles, were engaged to write a regular column for the Saturday Evening Post. This was a good gig. The space they had to fill was neither long nor short — about twelve hundred words, a gallop larger than the Comment that opens this magazine. The Post paid them well, and Didion and Dunne each had to file one piece a month. The column, called “Points West,” entailed their visiting a place of West Coast interest, interviewing a few…