I was a media escort. With those five words, John McNally begins his fictional biography of Jack Hercules Sheahan, a once promising graduate of “The famous Iowa Writers Workshop”. Jack, is suffering one of the greatest bouts of writers-block and underachievement to come out of The Workshop since its founding in 1939. For those...
Archive for February, 2010
Book Review and Author Interview: ‘After The Workshop’ by John McNally
There is no plan B
Recently I have been reading Anne Perry's early books and trying to discern the secrets of her popularity and longevity as a writer. Perry published her first Victorian detective novel when she was 39 years old and has since published more than 50 books. The amazing thing is that not one of her books...
When Your Novel Gets Stuck – Consider Writing a Short-Story
I was writing. All kinds of things: articles, letters, amusing emails (my curse), and of course blog posts. Yet I was not finishing my novel. At the time, I happened to be in the library and picked up a biography about Raymond Carver. Carver is arguably the best short-story writer the U.S. ever produced....