From this week’s post on Ramos On Craft
This line from my most recent Ramos On Craft post has stayed with me since I wrote it. The most powerful material a writer carries is rarely what he collected with intention. It arrived before he knew he was a writer, before he understood that ordinary life was worth recording.
I think about the thirteen year old boy in the back seat of a car on a summer highway, watching signs count down the miles to a roadside attraction he had never heard of. He was not taking notes. He did not know he was a writer. He was just surviving the drive.
Decades later that drive became a novel.
If you are not yet a subscriber to Ramos On Craft on Substack, I hope today is the day you join us.
Ramos On Craft publishes twice weekly for writers who are devoted readers of literary fiction, exploring craft questions that do not have easy answers through the specific, the personal, and the earned rather than the instructional and the general. No listicles, no shortcuts, and no advice the post itself does not model.
If you are somewhere in the middle of your own work, it was written for you.
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