Latest news with #DenisJohnson
RTÉ News
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Get Creative: The craft of non-fiction – on self-editing
Ever thought about writing non-fiction, be it an essay, a memoir or even a brief snapshot of your life? Why not take the leap? In a new series, author, critic and broadcaster Cristín Leach explores the craft of non-fiction. One exercise I give myself when I'm editing a draft of something I'm writing, is what I call The Headline Test. In a variation of Denis Johnson's advice to write "as if you are never going to get home again", I imagine I'm on the phone and the line is about to go dead. If communication is about to be cut, what is the single most important message to get across quickly? Or, if this was a newspaper story, what would the headline be? Once you've got that, write it down, put it on a sticky-note, stick it on the wall. This sentence or phrase is not a sentence that will appear in your writing, but it is the guiding light that will help you to edit it. The exercise produces two results. It ensures you will write what is most urgent. And it helps you understand what you can cut. To continue the news journalism analogy, it's a question that forces you to decide, what is the most important angle here? Picking a headline doesn't mean the piece of writing can't be complex, nuanced or layered. It is just that every one of those complications, nuances, and layers must serve the same purpose: to speak in some way to the headline that gets to the core of the piece of writing. Think of it as a version of an elevator pitch. Listen to Cristín Leach's audio essay Take a Seat, for Sunday Miscellany Sometimes stepping back and asking yourself 'what is this piece of writing actually about?' and identifying a one-line answer can be the editing question that unlocks the whole. Once you understand the main thrust of the piece, you can edit so that every sentence, anecdote, tangent, side-quest, and unexpected aside still talks back (in some way) to this angle. You can cut whatever does not. Something missing? You can also glance back at your 'headline' when you are wondering what it is that you have left out. The other question I ask myself when I'm editing my own work (and that of others) is really five questions in one: why are you telling me this now? 1. WHY are you telling me this now? 2. Why are YOU telling me this now? 3. Why are you telling ME this now? 4. Why are you telling me THIS now? 5. Why are you telling me this NOW? The five answers will help you to: identify the impetus behind the work, consciously establish an authorial voice, know your intended audience, figure out what to include or leave out, and understand what is most pertinent about this particular piece of writing. 'Why are you telling me this now?' can also help with The Headline Test. If you don't know the answer to any one of these questions when you are self-editing, it's likely the piece is falling down somewhere. When you figure out the answers to all five, you can fix it.
RTÉ News
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Get Creative: The craft of non-fiction
Ever thought about writing non-fiction, be it an essay, a memoir or even a brief snapshot of your life? Why not take the leap? In a new series, author, critic and broadcaster Cristín Leach explores the craft of non-fiction. When I'm writing, I think of the late American author Denis Johnson's oft-quoted three rules. He advised students to: 1. Write naked. That means to write what you would never say. 2. Write in blood. As if ink is so precious you can't waste it. 3. Write in exile. As if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail. That said, when it comes to writing personal essays, it might be useful to pair those rules with Stephen King's evergreen editing advice from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2020), to: "Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you… but then it goes out… it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it." The first personal essay I wrote and had published was written with the door slightly ajar, because I wrote it as I sat with my grandmother who was dying in a nursing home. The room was warm, her breathing steady, and she didn't wake up while I was there. The door was being kept just barely open as nurses came and went, stopping and popping their heads in to check if everything was still ok. Of course, nothing was ok because my grandmother was dying, but at the same time it was ok. She had lived a long life. She was comfortable. We were quiet and resting and waiting together. And, because I am a writer there was a notebook and pen in my bag, and so I began to write. Sometimes, your initial job as a writer is to just capture those words as they land. The essay was published almost three years later in Winter Papers 5 (2019), along with four photographs I took that day. While She Was Sleeping is one of those unusual essays that almost fell out of me fully formed. The stream of consciousness I wrote in my notebook by her bed was only lightly edited by me before submission, and barely touched by editors Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith, who suggested minor changes to some words and came up with the title to form the final version. Not every essay arrives like that, but opening or closing lines, or significant phrases attached to important observations, often do. Sometimes, your initial job as a writer is to just capture those words as they land. Right now, the island of Ireland is pulsing with a vibrant network of literary journals that are open to non-fiction writing, including personal essays: The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Gorse, Winter Papers, The Four Faced Liar, Profiles, Howl, The Pig's Back, Storms, Sonder, The Belfast Review, The Martello Journal, The Ogham Stone, Púca Magazine, Ropes, The Tangerine, Trasna. Tolka focuses exclusively on non-fiction (inviting submissions of essays, travel writing, reportage, and creative non-fiction hybrids like auto-fiction). They don't all pay for accepted work, but many of them do. And with publication comes something else: that early nourishment that can lay the ground for future themed anthologies, memoirs, and books of collected essays.
CBC
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Westward by Josée Lafrenière
Social Sharing Josée Lafrenière has made the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Westward. The winner of the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and their work will be published on CBC Books. The four remaining finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books. The shortlist will be announced on April 10 and the winner will be announced on April 17. If you're interested in other CBC Literary Prizes, the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize is currently accepting submissions. You can submit an original, unpublished poem or collection of poems from April 1-June 1. The 2026 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2026 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January. About Josée Lafrenière Josée Lafrenière is a Franco-Ontarian who now lives in Montreal and writes in English. She works as a freelance editor, copywriter and translator. Her fiction has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Headlight and the anthology Salut King Kong. Some pieces have also won the QWF-CBC Public's Choice Award and been shortlisted in the QWF-CBC contest and for the Prism International contest. Entry in five-ish words "Running away or toward?" The short story's source of inspiration "The main character here was a secondary character in an earlier story. I wondered what had happened to him. At the same time I was reading Denis Johnson's Train Dreams and I was also reflecting on how culture within a family line can disappear, based on my own family's history." First lines Smoke and dust refract the morning sun in the rail camp as Étienne Myre skulks out of the mess hall with cloth-wrapped sandwiches stowed in his pack. He stays behind the shanties and tents, skirting the walls, heading west. Sundays are the worst. Other days he works until night, under the stern eye of the rail boss, and then, in a belly-full stupor, drags himself to his cot to drop into sleep. But Sundays the Canadian Pacific gives them the day off for God and worship or drinking and whoring. He's tried them all. But as soon as his body stops moving, he's hounded by images: pennies on eyelids, crows cawing, a wailing infant. Check out the rest of the longlist The longlist was selected from more than 2,300 entries. A team of 12 writers and editors from across Canada compiled the list. The jury selects the shortlist and the eventual winner from the readers' longlisted selections. This year's jury is composed of Conor Kerr, Kudakwashe Rutendo and Michael Christie. The complete list is:
