Tracy Duvall

After a gunman shot at the back of my head from a few feet away and, amazingly, missed, I thought a lot about what would have happened if I’d been killed. I never imagined that people would skip past the tragedy of my death to debate the shooter’s motives and access to guns. Continue reading →

Soon after I published my novel, Bonobo!, I searched for the title on Amazon to see what came up. To my surprise, I found a film titled Bonobo (no exclamation point), which had been released recently, too. Clearly, this idea’s time had arrived.

So I watched it. Continue reading →

A Hologram for the King isn’t an especially good or bad film. Perhaps the most interesting aspect, for me, was the main character’s back infection. Having these while living overseas has become almost a hobby for me. So, as soon as the giant lump on Tom Hanks’ character’s (THC’s) back was revealed – while he was in Saudi Arabia, no less – I stopped scrolling through my Facebook feed and practically watched with attention.

Well, THC goes to the doctor, and she tells him, in so many words: we need to see whether this is the kind of back infection that Tracy gets or whether it’s metaphorical. The rest of the film made clear the differences between the two. To save you some money, here’s a synopsis: Continue reading →

Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work! – a two-day read for me – has something useful for writers aside from its inspirational self-help advice. The section titled, “Structure is Everything,” includes nine different descriptions or graphs of story structures. They range from abstract models to Kurt Vonnegut’s graphs of three specific stories.

While I’m loathe to blindly follow a formula, it is useful to compare the narrative I’m writing to successful ones and to consider revisions as a result. Luckily, Kafka didn’t follow a standard, fairy tale approach in writing “Metamorphosis,” as Vonnegut’s hilarious (to me) graph makes clear.

For me, one of the oddities of producing a book is that getting it published and read causes at least as much anxiety as writing it does. As part of my continuing effort to figure out how to build a “platform,” I’ve started reading Show Your Work!, by Austin Kleon.

It’s short, so in one day I’ve read about 40 percent of it. That’s far enough to see that the title means that we should show our working selves – sharing aspects of our process in the hope of accruing not only followers but inspiration from others. Then, presumably, we’ll be able to ‘show our (finished) work’ to more people and with greater success.

Generally I like the gist of Kleon’s advice. One of my delights as an ethnographer was summarizing my research to the people whose lives I was trying to understand and hearing new complexities from them – likewise with professors and then colleagues. I’m not sure that I built much of a platform, but others’ ideas have strengthened my work.

Nonetheless, one of these days, I’ll write a caveat to this idea, based on my experience with writers’ groups. I might rewrite Kleon’s title as Show Your Work (but not to trolls).

I recently attended the Washington Writers Conference. Before registering I sought reviews or personal accounts of attendees and couldn’t find any, so perhaps this report will help anyone considering attending in future years. In short, I’m glad I went once, but that was enough. Continue reading →