Aloneness
Lately, more than ever, I’ve been thinking about a quote by the late, great playwright Sam Shepard: “Aloneness is a condition of writing. You look…
Chris Orcutt’s Favorite Short Stories
Two weeks ago, I wrote about the backstory of my short story collection The Man, The Myth, The Legend, explaining what was happening in my…
My Prodigiously Convoluted Yet Miraculously Productive Low-Tech Writing Process — Part 2 — With a Few Modest Writing Secrets
In the first installment of this piece, I described the first half of my writing process: Writing the first draft in longhand or on a…
WANTED: A 21st Century Author Promoter
I love writing. I love sitting down with half a dozen fresh Blackwing 602 pencils, sharpening them to a razor edge and filling up pages…
Farewell, Facebook. Ta-Ta, Twitter. I’ve Got Writing to Do.
I’ve been tired of social media for a long time. However, like a drug addict, I’ve continued to take hits off it, hoping to get a…
Paying Attention as a Fiction Writer
I have been writing fiction since I was 13 years old, when I first read Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger and was swept away not only by the…
To All So-Called Authors: Stop Doing This; You Look Like Idiots
Maybe I shouldn’t be giving away my writing secrets. Maybe I should be like Ernest Hemingway, who, with the exception of a couple of Paris…