Christopher Meeks's Blog
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May.13.2013
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. - Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), U.S....
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May.12.2013
Why is it that some books have you eagerly turning the pages after your bedtime and other books work like sleeping pills? Partly, it’s style. Why is William Faulkner revered by many English majors and Mad magazine by other people? Style. Is it everything?
“Style” is one of the elements of strong...
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Apr.02.2013
I tried something new last year: teaching online. I live and write in California, but I’ve been teaching creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University via the internet. I’ve never been to New Hampshire. Even so, part of me is there. It’s a new world.
One thing I quickly learned about...
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Mar.15.2013
“A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.” -- Aldous Huxley
Critiquing is the most difficult and tender area in writing. In many ways, it's the Rorschach test of being human. You've just spent hours, days,...
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Feb.11.2013
My cousin in Minnesota wrote an email to many of his relatives including me asking us to think about Iran’s nuclear goals and our own bombs. I grew up in the late fifties and sixties worried about the bomb. In grade school, we had drills where we’d have to duck and cover in the hallway in case of a...
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Feb.02.2013
Sometimes a good sentence zings in like a mosquito on a mission from the Minnesota woods. When I hear or read a good line, it often catches me off guard and makes me see my world in a new way.
I remember when I first started teaching creative writing, at the California Institute of the Arts, and I...
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Jan.21.2013
Underneath all good writing is a strong structure. You may not see it, but it’s there.
The word “structure”—to new writers especially—can sound like a quick way to make something dull. It’s the teacher at school who makes you diagram sentences and create outlines. It’s Dad coming into his 14-year-...
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Jan.02.2013
I read part of it all the way through. —Samuel Goldwyn (1882–1974), U.S. film producer
To write, you have to read. Most of us forget that. When my son was very young, I’d wake up at 5 a.m. and spend the first two hours of the day writing, then I would go off to the California Institute of the Arts...
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Dec.25.2012
“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in your head.”— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)
Why write or read stories? Why, for that matter, dance...
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Dec.13.2012
Going back to 1999: Julia Roberts, superstar, from across a crowded room, gazes into the eyes of her charming, self-deprecating Joe Everyman (played by Hugh Grant—nice average independent bookstore owner in England) and declares her love for him. He loves her! They embrace! The audience cheers! We...
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Dec.09.2012
A poem . . . begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness…. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words. —Robert Frost
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic. —Oscar Wilde
Some...
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Dec.02.2012
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. —Robert Frost (1874–1963), U.S. poet.
Readers want truth. We read “how to” articles to learn things—not false things, but true things. We want to learn the truth about products and services—not some BS marketing hype. If we read something stupid or...
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Nov.30.2012
Some days or months after Al Gore invented the Internet--make it the nineties--I’d been asked by a friend working for a software company called EFuse if I’d like to write a column. “On what?” I’d asked, and he said, “On anything you want.” Basically, he wanted a number of writers creating “content...
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Oct.20.2012
On this day in October, this page of mine on Red Room reached 250,000 views around 12:30 p.m. I predicted in September that I'd hit this milestone in October. To arrive here has my head spinning. Did my ten closest friends come here a hundred times a day every day? That’s doubtful.
Rather, I have...
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Oct.08.2012
In the eighties, I was selling tile in Woodland Hills, and I was writing short stories that I showed few people. I felt naked in the stories. I knew they were good but they needed more of something. I didn’t know what “more” was, so I took a huge leap. I joined a graduate writing program at USC.
My...
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'Love At Absolute Zero' is a gift--and one of the many that continue to emerge from the pen and mind and brilliant trait for finding the humor in life that makes him so genuinely fine a writer.”
—Critic Grady Harp, Top-Ten Amazon reviewer
About Christopher
Christopher Meeks writes short fiction and novels. His book of short stories, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea earned great reviews including the Los Angeles Times ("poignant and wise") and a blurb in Entertainment Weekly that said, "A...
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