Tag Archive for: c.j. hribal|reading series|why there are words

Faculty member Sarah Stone will read Thursday,September 13th at the Why There are Words Literary Reading Series.  The reading will take place from 7:00 – 9:00 pm at Studio 333 in Sausalito, CA.  Visit Why There are Words for more information.

In the meantime, you can read Sarah’s interview for the series:

Your use of colors in your writing is so powerful. What is your philosophy behind how and why you use color?

SS:  Like you, I’m both a visual artist and a writer. My undergraduate degree is in painting, and I’m still fascinated by color and shape. My paintings were primarily huge and full of animals: peacocks, aardvarks, poison arrow frogs, wild pigs who’d thought they were rocks until they woke up. They became more and more narrative as I went on. Finally I just began to write. My early drafts aren’t visual at all though. And they don’t have any plot worth mentioning. It’s all people eating, having sex, and talking about politics. Worse, agreeing about politics. Full of exposition and explanation. I’m doing it again in my new book. This very morning, the characters were in a giant industrial kitchen, ostensibly working to solve the problems of world hunger, actually setting the scene for sexual intrigue and betrayal and braising vegetables. Sooner or later, these people are going to have to stop cooking and talking and do something. If this were someone else’s draft, I might say, “These characters are in a situation, but they’re not yet in a predicament.” When I was a brand-new writer, I wrote gleefully; now I see all the problems as I work. Nonetheless, my early drafts are intractable. I have to follow them through anyway. Maybe in the third or eighth draft, something will happen. Meanwhile, no clock is ticking. My characters are making ratatouille...[Keep Reading]…

Sarah is the author of The True Sources of the Nile: A Novel (2002, Doubleday) and coauthor of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers (2004, Longman) with Ron Nyren.


Faculty member C.J. Hribal will read Thursday, August 9th at the Why There are Words Literary Reading Series.  The reading will take place from 7:00 – 9:00 pm at Studio 333 in Sausalito, CA.  Visit Why There are Words for more information.

In the meantime, you can read his interview for the series:

I think the hardest and most important thing I can do when I write is work with an empathetic imagination. I don’t know when I get into a character’s head and heart what I’m going to find there. I certainly don’t have a road map for where I want to get to.  It’s an exploration, and when I delve deep into a character’s voice and thoughts I try to lose myself, to become them as much as possible. I don’t worry about the philosophy of what they’re expressing, I just want to get at the expression itself. As a person I’ve blundered through most of my life, and my characters often blunder through theirs. Maybe that’s what helps me get at their fear and their grief as well as their joy. Life overwhelms us from time to time, and into the darkness we jump, feet first. That’s what I try to do when I’m writing, catch my characters mid-jump, while they’re still howling on the way down,  before they know if the parachute is going to open or not...[Keep Reading]…

C.J. is the author of the novel, The Company Car (2006, Random House).