Books for Writers: "The Stuff of Fiction"

           Douglas Bauer does not have a Wikipedia entry nor, seemingly, a website of his own but his name and partial biography can be found in several places on the World Wide Web.

The Bennington College website reports Bauer — who is the author of three novels and at least two books of nonfiction, editor of two anthologies, and a member of Bennington’s faculty — as the winner of a $25,000 literary fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts this year. Bauer also was lauded, in October 2009, as one of the best food writers of the year in the anthology Best Food Writing 2009 by Da Capo press. According to the Napa Valley Writer's Conference (NVWC) website, Bauer has taught creative writing at Harvard University, Smith College and, in 2004, at the NVWC.

On Writing: Where are the Quotation Marks?

Quotation marks are, among their other roles, used to “enclose a person's spoken words or unspoken thoughts.” (Rules for Writers, page 262) It's a maxim I've followed all my writing life, and one I have long believed all serious writers adopted, too.

Imagine my surprise, then, to note author Kaye Gibbons — lauded by talk-show magnate Oprah Winfrey, The New York Times Book Review and others — did not use a single quotation mark in her 1987 book Ellen Foster, nor in the 2006 follow up The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster. Yet, there are many characters in these two books, and those characters offer words and thoughts aplenty.