Blog Posts
This post by magazine writer Ben Mauk has renewed my appetite for taking note of the world. And encouraged me to buy a new notebook.
As I celebrate Mother’s Day this year with a visit from my own amazing mom, I’m thinking of mother characters who play central – and complicated – roles in novels I’ve read this year.
The way she tells it, it’s happening before you know it’s happening, much the same way the character is plunged into the sea or down a steep drop or into the vortex of an irrevocable relational tangle. The prose is swift and unexpectedly physical.
Those first words set the tone, voice, place, language, and objective of the novel. Like the set of instructions that comes with a game, they teach the reader how to “play the game” of this world.