Author: Steve Himmer
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A Conversation With Jürgen Fauth
What books and/or authors have had the most influence on your writing? Some of the most obvious influences on Kino are probably writers like Thomas Pynchon, Alan Moore, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, my teachers Frederick Barthelme and Mary Robison, my wife Marcy Dermansky — but I’ve also drawn a lot of inspiration from the movies:…
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Radio Iris
Novels of work, particularly those that take on modern laboring in all its absurdity and confusion, are a favorite subgenre of mine. From Magnus Mills’s fence builders and bus drivers caught in bureaucratic nightmares to the bizarre and often brutal administrative interactions of Lydie Salvayre’s Everyday Life or Stacey Levine’s Dra—, it’s a fictional category…
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Thoughts on Revision
A linked list of all posts from Revision Month can be found here. There is power in a first draft, but Hemingway was mostly right: first drafts are shit. Maybe it’s not that way for everyone, but for me and what seems like many people, first drafts are a start; you find your story in…
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Answers? Part II
A linked list of all posts from Revision Month can be found here. Today more answers, from the inimitable Sean Lovelace, who has written about revision on his blog here. I am in a bit of a funk. How do I work myself out of it? Usually I do one of a few things: 1.…
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Answers?
A linked list of all posts from Revision Month can be found here. A few of the writers who answered my call for revision thoughts chose to directly address the questions I had mentioned I was thinking about. Below we have Nicolle Elizabeth and “Jimmy Lo“http://jimmylorunning.com/. + Nicolle Elizabeth on Revision I think that revision…
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Editing, Teaching, and Revision
A linked list of all posts from Revision Month can be found here. We go through changes, as people, as writers. We go through MFA programs. We go through workshops. We go through drafts and drafts. We become editors. We become teachers. We go to conferences. We go to colonies. We get rejected. We get…
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What Matters in Our Stories
A linked list of all posts from Revision Month can be found here. I led a workshop last night. What is always interesting to me is how workshop stories seem to have the same few problems. Stories lack stakes, lack change, lack desire. I feel as if these are all part of the same issue.…
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Finding the Clues Within Your Story
A linked list of all posts from Revision Month can be found here. We’re moving into the last week of Revision Month, and with that the last week I’d given myself for this latest novel revision. That deadline is just not going to happen, at this point. I’ll have to extend it, but Revision Month…
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Listening and Tinkering
A linked list of all posts from Revision Month can be found here. But just because we talk to ourselves doesn’t mean we know how to listen. I have this sneaking suspicion that writers who say “listen to your gut” mean only when something is wrong or when something is just right. That’s when I…
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Haunted by Old Drafts, Starting New Ones
A linked list of all posts from Revision Month can be found here. Two thoughts: 1. I searched through about 30 books yesterday looking at their beginnings. In the meantime, I realized I had lost another copy of The Great Gatsby. Why is it always our favorite books that go missing, or are those the…
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How We See Our Own Work
A linked list of all posts from Revision Month can be found here. How do we forget what we love about our most recent drafts enough that we can see our way clear to a new draft? Or is that even the right question? In her revision tip, Elisa Gabbert suggested we save our darlings…
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Revision in Action
A linked list of all posts from Revision Month can be found here. Now on to Part II of our revision month. I had to take a temporary break from the internet to go to a wedding and the zoo. Life with baby. The interruptions of the real world. Over the weekend, I got some…