#steve himmer

[lauraellenscottles]

Novel notes: The first 10 pages

Novel notes: The first 10 pages

I know we have lots of anxiety about those first ten pages, especially when we’re looking for an agent or a publisher, so this may seem like counter-intutitive advice: You’re first 10 does not have to be high energy, crowded, or chaotic to “hook” your reader. Hooks are for yanking fish out of water just before you kill and eat them. Your reader isn’t a trout. How about assuming your reader has…

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[millionsmillions]

Authors are writing from a networked world and seeing life through that lens whether they allow it to their characters or not. So why not embrace it? Why not make it matter, because it already does however much we doth protest?

An argument in favor of bringing modern technology and social media into literary fiction from Steve Himmer.

[margaretlafleur]

This is fascinating and touches on a topic I think about, often. (And am thinking about in particular in relation to a story I’m trying to write.) How is technology incorporated? Relationships happen on so many invisible levels, now, and how can that be reflected on the page? I’ve read more dystopian future novels than I have ever read a novel or story that incorporates Facebook in a meaningful or real way.

Also, I love the term “the nostalgic present.” 

[millionsmillions]

It’s the stuff of fiction, the lives we glimpse in peripheries of our own, whether those we observe in mysterious passing or those we pull from thin air. But when we pull those lives to the center to tell their stories, what do we put in their place? Too often it seems to be nothing, making so much of the fiction I read feel claustrophobic with no sense of other lives mattering at the edges and no impression of a world deeper and wider than those parts inhabited by the central characters we’re asked to attend to. Fiction can show us an individual, idiosyncratic mind, or at least the semblance of one in the tangled, rambling, multivocal chaos of our own thoughts in lieu of the tidier, deliberate narratives we’d like to imagine our intentions and actions to be. Outside ourselves, though, there are so many others going about actions and intentions and baffling, beautiful lives of their own, riding tiny bicycles uphill and yelling hilarious non-sequiturs of half-conversation into their phones on the bus and — because those others aren’t always human — chasing each other in circles as three squirrels are doing outside my window just now. Perhaps none of those amount to much narrative potential apart from being cast as metaphors in the shadow of a more dominant plot, but I want to be reminded of those active edges when I read stories.

Steve Himmer, "An Eye to the Edges: On Other Stories"

[sundoglit]

"It’s too bad, though. Gretchen could have — and probably has — done wonderful things with that girl and her kite. No doubt there would have been fairies involved, because there always are as we work our way through the five billion volumes (give or take) of the Rainbow Magic Fairies series of books. Possibly there would have been mermaids and likely her imaginary friends Ella and Emma and Rafi (the top three from her vast menagerie of unseen — by her parents — acquaintances). She would have zeroed in on the heart of that picture, the most magnificent possibilities of it, the fantastic dream that holds aloft any kite, because how else could anything possibly fly?"

--from Steve Himmer's I'm Not Writing, I'm Just Writing | ROMANTICS: Texts Inspired by Matthew Salesses' I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying

[iambikaudio-blog]

It was the same of any one of my mornings, except for that nagging feeling it wasn't. Here's @stevehimmer's The Bee-Loud Glade, in MOVING IMAGES.  And here it is in audio.

[strandedstmarkscitylights]

One of the aforementioned articles that was most popular for The Millions this year. And reading it you immediately see why. Steve Himmer discusses library cuts and over-protective guardians to argue that he, a reader and writer (and father) thinks the worst thing you can do is stunt a kid's ability to become a reader. Really beautiful article.

[millionsmillions]

I can’t help but remember that reading — both the careful selection of books and being given enough privacy to quietly read them myself — was among the first freedoms I had. Those early choices, and being trusted to make them, seem like foundational experiences now, decades later.

Steve Himmer on "Making Room for Readers", especially young ones.

This post is part of our “Best of 2011” series, which highlights exceptional original pieces that have been published on The Millions this year.