Quotes from Rebecca McClanahan

The shortest distance between two points is always under construction.

Unlike art, the making of home does not stay done. Every morning, every evening, the mess awaits us. The messy, hungry, beautiful world, wanting and needing our touch.

Because the writer has done her job, the world of the book I am reading has become, for the moment at least, more real than the world at my elbow. Books this good should carry a warning: Your quiche might burn, your child might escape his playpen, the morning glory vine might strangle your roses, and you'll never know.

A writer need not be bound by flat statement like "It was a rough sea," when verbs like tumble and roil and seethe wait to spell from her pen.

Sometimes the action in our descriptions is present but hidden, and a slight rewording is all it takes to bring the motion into view. For instance, "Her hair was black and curly " can become "Her black hair curled in ringlets around her cheeks.

If I were fully conscious of my surroundings at this moment, I would describe the light through the window, the way it searches out the apples in the glass bowl, buffing them to an unnatural sheen. I bought them for their fragrance, not their freshness, so even if you were to close your eyes, you'd know you were in the presence of apples. You would smell the heavy softening, the sweet rotting where apple ends and cider begins.

What really matters, finally, is the big picture, the fictional dream that lingers after the details have vanished. The big picture is formed not only by our descriptions of characters, settings and events but also by forces that reside above and below our story's surface—atmosphere, mood, feeling, motif, theme, form, structure and tone. These terms are far from interchangeable.

Did you hear what you just said?" I say. "That's exactly where your originality lies. In each bone of your body." I go on to explain the root of originality: origin. Origin, as in source, spring, primary being. We are most original when we are most ourselves. Only then are we close to our first source, our fueling passions. Discovering

Positioning ourselves, physically and psychologically, on the same plane with our subjects can help us avoid what Gardner refers to as "frigidity" in our writing, one of the "faults of soul" he warns against. Frigidity is coldhearted failure to respond on a deep, human level to the characters and events of our story. Sometimes,

In the previous chapter we discussed how a figure of speech fails when images are too farfetched or mixed, or when one image cancels out the other. The same principle applies to physical descriptions.

Use only those adjectives that call forth the qualities of the object; avoid adjectives that label or explain. Words like lovely, old, wonderful, noteworthy or remarkable are explanatory labels; they do not suggest sense impressions. Adjectives like bug-eyed, curly, bumpy, frayed or moss-covered, on the other hand, are descriptive.

Another thing I noticed as the children wrote was how often they changed their viewing perspectives. A child rarely looks at his world straight on. He lies flat on his back in the middle of a field, or peeks out from a hiding place, or climbs a tree and watches the scene from above.

One way to focus on details is to describe the various parts that make up the whole. A tangerine, for instance, consists of rind, juice, seeds, fruit, pulp, grainy membranes, stem, blossoms and leaves. Describing each of these parts will force you to notice details you might otherwise overlook, what Chekhov called the "little particulars." Later you may decide you've included too many particulars. If so, you can always remove some of them or group them in a different way. In