All artists are storytellers. Sometimes the story is conceptual. Sometimes it’s revolutionary. Sometimes it’s personal. And sometimes the story is a retelling of a familiar tale. Medieval, Gothic, and Renaissance art is filled with creative and beautiful images recounting familiar stories from the bible and classical mythology. Tour guides and art historians often point to the storytelling in church art, saying that the illiterate and semi-literate parishioners “read” essential religious texts in pictures. Join the art loving tourists at San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome to see how Caravaggio told the story of Saint Matthew in three paintings. Or just
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True-ish Crime
Like many mystery fans, I’ve dipped my toe into the true crime genre. I’ve read accounts of infamous crimes, watched many documentaries, and listened to more than a few podcasts. There’s a huge difference between good crime fiction and true crime. One of them makes much more sense—and it’s NOT stories that give accurate accounts of real life criminal behavior. True crime rarely makes sense. The criminal masterminds that populate fiction are uncommon in reality. That’s a good thing. Few real criminals are intelligent enough to plan an Agatha Christie style murder or an action movie style heist. That’s why
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New Collective Nouns
I’m a fan of collective nouns. I find charm and intrigue in an unkindness of ravens, a murder of crows, an ostentation of peacocks, and the rest. So, the other morning when I woke up at a crazy early hour to the sound of baby birds singing in the courtyard —and to my cat’s great pleasure at their choir’s tunes—I started to muse about the “choir of baby birds” and from there I was off and running with a list of ridiculous, original collective nouns. There’s no reason I should share them, except that I had so much fun writing
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Real Rivals & Fiction
I just saw a new Broadway musical called, ‘War Paint.’ It’s about the intense rivalry between beauty business mavericks Helen Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, played by Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole. ‘War Paint’ sets their fierce enmity to music. This is not the first time I’ve seen this kind of show. A bunch of years back, I saw ‘Imaginary Friends.’ The premise of that musical, written by Nora Ephron with music by Marvin Hamlisch, was that Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy—two notorious literary rivals—meet in hell and sort of work things out. I went to that one largely because it
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The Silent Writer
I just spent a few days with laryngitis. It got to the point where I referred to myself as ‘The Silent Writer.’ My communications with freelance clients were by text & email, as I tried to keep the croaking into the phone to a minimum. Aside from the coughing fits—painful, body racking, and exhausting—and the general malaise it wasn’t too awful. But there was one strange side effect that got in the way of both freelance and fiction productivity: trying to avoid talking meant I had to avoid reading text out loud. This is something I always do before handing
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Seeing Monsters Everywhere
Under the bed, behind the door, in the attic dusty attic, in the damp basement, in the rustling leaves, in the shadows outside the window… As a child prone to nightmares I was pretty good at monster spotting. I’m still prone to nightmares—I had a doozy when I was in Argentina with coati turning out to be an invading alien species—but most of the time I just amuse myself with another kind of monster spotting. I look up and find gargoyles and wander through museums finding dragons and other beasts. So it’s not strange that I’d look up at the
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Height & Perspective
I’m short. There are places in the world where I’m the average height for a woman and a few where I’m even tall, but in the U.S. and most of the places I’ve traveled to, I am short. I know this from an objective point of view, but I don’t feel short. Most of the time I only notice that I’m short when: I have to use a step ladder to reach something that taller friends reach without aid; I see a photos of myself with a group of people; or the moment when I walk into the embrace of
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Character Glitches
Fiction often dances on the line between the incredible and the realistic. Keeping a story contained within the confines of what is credible—possible, likely, normal, conventional, ordinary or REAL—is not as easy as it sounds. First, the characters rarely cooperate, because the more realistic the character the more likely they are to have beliefs (dreams, delusions, or fantasies). Like real people, well-drawn characters are complex—and hard to write! Every once in a while I read a novel with a character described as logical. These hyper-rational creations are often felled by an encounter with some element of magic—they meet a ghost,
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