Nina Schuyler's Blog
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May.11.2013
I was at a reading, not sure who the readers were. The room was filled with all ages. The young crowd, with glistening skin and shiny hair, as if dipped in gloss. They sat tall, enormous, laughing and showing off white teeth, looking at each other—how could they not?
An older crowd, too. I’ll just...
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May.06.2013
I’m always astonished to discover how much tension and subtext a good writer can achieve in a single sentence. A good writer makes it look effortless, but when you begin to take apart sentences, you discover the care and thoughtfulness of the writer. You begin to feel like you've crawled...
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Apr.29.2013
“I Want To Show You More,” by Jamie Quatro
Reviewed By Nina Schuyler
April 29th, 2013
While a short story collection can be knitted together in a lot of different ways—character, theme, setting, subject matter or tone—how tightly it should be woven is less defined. Some collections are so...
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Apr.26.2013
"And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax,
and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities
which we call meaning."-- Anthony Burgess, Enderby
He's right, of course. It's the words that glitter, sometimes leaping off the page to make the reader pause and reimagine the entire...
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Apr.19.2013
How does a mother with two young children write a novel? It is not impossible (though some days it feels exactly that). Pare down expectations, I tell myself. A little bit here, a little there. Sneak in a half hour between naps. Or nap and stay up late and luxuriate in an entire hour of silence...
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Apr.04.2013
11 Beautiful Books of Poetry for Children
By Nina Schuyler, The Children’s Book Review
If we arrive eager to lap up language, hungry to make our tongues work the magic of speaking, why not read something that begs to be spoken aloud? Why not read that which rises to the occasion and...
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Mar.12.2013
“Mary Coin,” by Marisa Silver
Reviewed By Nina Schuyler
March 12th, 2013
Novels are like big stretchy bags, so willing and able to hold a multitude of voices. There’s a fancy name for this—heteroglossia, from the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, who believed the power of...
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Feb.25.2013
Revision #2, done. A new novel, 300 pages so far. Now what?
A friend suggested I use a writing exercise, one that she learned in autobiographical writing. In that class, students were given 10 minutes to write the full spectrum of their lives—the big sweep of it, the grand timeframe, ten minutes,...
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Feb.07.2013
After reviewing Hans Keilson’s novel, Life Goes On (see earlier blog post), and after reading Francine Prose’s soaring praise of Keilson’s other books, “masterpieces, and Hans Keilson is a genius,” I had to read The Death of the Adversary.
In The Death of the Adversary, Keilson’s narrator, a young...
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Jan.24.2013
A blog chain called “The Next Best Thing” is going around. Writers respond to questions about their recent or forthcoming work. My former student, Diane Glazman (thewritenote.blogspot.com), tagged me and now I’m it, so to speak.
What is your title of your book: The Translator, which will be...
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Jan.20.2013
It’s always baffled me when a student says as soon as he finds his voice he will feel like a real writer. It seems to me the real challenge is finding your voices. Set fiction aside for a moment. In your day to day encounters, it would be unusual, even odd, to speak in the same voice to everyone...
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Jan.13.2013
In late 1928, the left-wing playwright Friedrich Wolf wrote, “Let’s hope 1929 brings us plenty of struggle, friction, and sparks.”
He got his wish. In 1929, the U.S. stock market crashed. Within weeks, the U.S. cut off the flow of loans to Germany and began demanding repayment on outstanding...
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Jan.12.2013
I use lists all the time. To do lists, partly for the immense satisfaction of crossing something out, grocery lists, and mental lists of what’s packed in the diaper bag, what’s in my bag before I step out the front door.
So why not use lists in your writing?
Paul Harding uses a list to great...
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Oct.04.2011
“How I love you, she always wanted to say, and you can never know it. I would die for you without a thought. You have given to my life its sheerest, its profoundest pleasure. But she could never say that. Instead, she would say, “How was school?” “Was lunch all right?” “Did you have your...
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Sep.22.2011
In Stephen O’Connor’s short story, “Ziggurat,” (from his short story collection here comes another lesson) a Minotaur discovers a new girl sitting at the computer playing Ziggurat, Panic! And U-Turn. “This was the pine-paneled section of the Labyrinth, which is where the Minotaur had been...
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About Nina
I'm thrilled my next novel, THE TRANSLATOR, will be published July, 2013 by Pegasus Books. My first novel, THE PAINTING, was named by the San Francisco Chronicle as a Best Book for 2004 and by MSNBC as a “fearless debut.” It also was nominated for a Northern...
Connections
Causes Nina Schuyler Supports
Environment California
Sierra Club
National Resources Defense Council
Nina’s Favorite Books
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
The Death of the Adversary, Hans Keilson
Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee
Jazz, Toni...