Dispatch (No. 2)
March 19, 2011 in Personal
It’s early morning. I’m sitting in my hotel room again, the Andean foothills still framing the airport runway in the distance outside my window, listening to Solsbury Hill as I write these words.
Gabriel García Márquez once described the process of writing as a form of carpentry. He said to write well you need to hypnotize your reader by constructing your sentences in such as way as to lull them into a trance. A stray comma, an errant adjective, and the trance would falter. Your reader would stir and the writing would fail. I also recall that Charles Bukowski once said writing was like seeing a cockroach on the wall and reaching up quickly and smashing it with your hand before it gets away. Read the rest of this entry →

