Though my writing education started with the short story, Ive recently branched out a great dealinto novel writing, creative nonfiction, screenplays, and even some poetry. In all of this, though, my emphasis is narrative. I live in awe of the many various forms stories can take. So often, its just a matter of following our stories rather than trying to control them, of finding out what they are and letting them be that. We think were shaping the work, but the work has a shape of its own, if only we can find it.I dont believe in rules, per se, but I do believe in choices. Writing any narrative is a series of choiceschoices about who our characters are and what they experience, choices about tone and point of view, plot and structure, conflict, world, imagery, genre, and so on. Many of these may be subconscious for a writer, but theyre choices we make all the same.As an editor and teacher of writing, I see my role as demonstrating just what some of these choices are and how they effect a given narrative. I want to show you how other writers may have confronted similar issues in the past. I dont do a lot of line editing, but instead focus on those bigger-picture issues that give a story life and shape.As a reader, my interests tend to vary quite a lot. I love the giant drama of writers like Charles Dickens and Patrick Obrien. I love the quiet precision of Virginia Wolfe and James Salter, the sheer mastery of James Baldwin and Alice Munro, the imaginative force of George R.R. Martin and Neil Gaiman, the strangeness of Kazuo Ishiguro. I can fall in love with a story of any genre as long as theres a real story there.That said, I dont believe that my interests should be your interests. More, I want to show you whats happening in your work already, and how you might help it along, help a narrative become what it wants to be. I love diving into the guts of a piece of writing to really see how its builtand how it might be built better.Student and client work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, and Granta among others. Books have been published with Harper Collins, Picador Press, and Black Lawrence Press among others.
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