Charlotte Rains Dixon

Alice Sebold, Writing, and the Unconscious

Writing is living; living is writing. I am one of those people who is so identified with my calling that I can’t seperate myself from it.  I see analogies to writing and the writing process in everything.  Apparently the same is true with Alice Sebold. Catching up on my magazine reading at lunchtime today (magazines […]

Writing Quote of the Week (A Few Days Late)

The mega-article on global warming ruined me for any other writing (or any other thing, like thinking) during the time I was completing it, but here’s my quote offering, by My Favorite Writer In The World, Ellen Gilchrist : "I am doing the best I can to teach them but there is really very little […]

Writing Translation

Happy May Day. My student, Ben Norwood, sent me a wonderful end-of-the-semester gift today–a copy of the The Republic of Letters, the journal begun by Saul Bellow.  Ben translated one of the stories in it, a piece called, “Xavier the Leper,” by Alberto Rangel, from Spanish. I’m just in awe of this. The story is […]

This Week’s Writing Quote

"A writer should be like a playwright–putting people on stage, putting ideas on stage, making the reader become the audience."  David Halberstam, in the New York Times article about his death

Bad Writing Habits Follow Me Wherever I Go

I’ve been working on removing an excess of interiority from my novel.  Scenes which otherwise might clip along are bogged down by my protagonist, the beloved Emma Jean, thinking too damn much.  We’ve been talking about this bad habit of mine in my weekly writing group, but I hadn’t internalized it until I started reading […]

No Readers But Lots of Writers?

The other day I dragged myself to the gym.  (Yes, I do manage to accomplish that once in awhile.)  The man on the treadmill next to me, who later introduced himself as Richard, was reading a Michael Connelly novel and I was reading Between, Georgia by Joshilyn Jackson. We were discussing the vagaries of putting […]

Rewriting Without Ruination

I can never decide if I like writing the rough draft or rewriting better.  Actually, it usually depends on where I am in the novel.  If I’m writing a rough draft, I wish I was rewriting.  If I am rewriting, I long for the freedom of the rough draft.

Brings to mind a saying my Dad used to have hanging in his basement workshop: