Sublime

the basis of that most profound expression of the American psyche, the game of baseball, a game whose object is to leave home in order to return to it again, transformed by the time spent circling the bases. And that famous shortstop Odysseus also played this game, propelled around the world by the same dream, of returning home in the end, transfor

I never did find a buyer for the book. Or the next one, either. It was ten years before I got the first check for something I had written and ten more before a novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, was actually published.

Not only did I learn how to write a novel in Provincetown, I found the perfect person to read it. Elizabeth McCracken was another of the writing fellows at the Work Center that season, and she lived three houses away from me. If I looked out my kitchen window I could see if her light was on. Sometimes you don’t realize what’s lacking in life until

Writing it was my attempt to kick myself in my own rear, part of my continual effort to write my way to a better life. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,” Kafka wrote. It should wake us up and hammer at our skull. Writing this book has served that purpose for me. I’ve also written it, I hope, for you. When it comes to what we wri

I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascin

The article that records everything you did on your trip will fascinate you because it was your trip. Will it fascinate the reader? It won’t. The mere agglomeration of detail is no free pass to the reader’s interest. The detail must be significant.

writing book

“The ocean is very big and a skiff is small and hard to see,” the old man said. He noticed how pleasant it was to have someone to talk to instead of speaking only to himself and to the sea. “I missed you,” he said. “What did you catch?”