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Moonlight
Friday, September 28th, 2012
What is it about little kids and th
e moon? We’ve always lived in town—where there were plenty of other lights—and their personalities are quite different, but at a certain age, they each were the first to spot the moon when we went out at night. On Twitter and Facebook, it’s the parents of toddlers who are posting things about the moon’s phases. When I was a child, I called the moon the cookie, and my father the linguistics professor used that anecdote to open a paper about metaphor.
Now that my kids are teens, they aren’t as impressed. We drug ourselves out into a moonlit night recently and I tried to take them for a walk on a trail that it helps to be able to see. (One joy of our neighborhood is that we’ve got this little pocket darkness within walking distance of our house.) It was already late, we hadn’t planned this, so I had to settle for a few yards into the woods and an agreement to try again next month when I’d given everyone fair warning. (more…)
My Monday morning writing club has an ongoing argument about the importance of a quick start to a novel: diving right in versus a slower reveal. The rulemeisters say it’s all got to be there on the first page: meet the hero, introduce the conflict, set the tone and genre. The first page makes a promise to the reader that must be fulfilled. “But I’m not writing a thriller,” one of the clubbers says, or “Surely that’s for genre fiction, not literary.”
