ARCHIVE FOR Henriette Lazaridis

We've all had that moment as readers when we stumble across a sentence in a novel or essay that sings to us from the page. There are sentences we want to wrap our tongues around, that we speak aloud just to revel in their aural qualities. For each installment of this brand new blog series, Henriette Lazaridis chooses a single sentence from a work of literature and shows us why it is music to our ears.

This blog post is part announcement, part call to action. The announcement portion is that The Drum is now paying its contributors a small honorarium, and we are doing so before our fundraising machinery is guaranteed to support us beyond one year in this project. We are taking a risk. The call to action is that we writers should do what we can to bring the literary marketplace (in which we work) into the actual marketplace (in which we pay our bills)

Three days after you read this blog post, I am going to start writing my third novel. I already know this because I have planned a gathering of writers in my house for this weekend, and we will all be holed up in our separate spaces working on our manuscripts. The difference with me is that my manuscript will be completely new on Saturday morning. I will be sitting down to write the very first sentences of the first draft.

Last month, I posted about that feeling you have when ideas aren't even ideas yet but you can sense their almost arrival. As the founding editor of an audio-only magazine (currently taking submissions, by the way), I thought I should put my money where my mouth is and record the audio of that piece

You know the feeling, that feeling of a tickle or a whisper, or even less a faint presence of something in the back of your mind. Well, strictly not the back of your mind, but more the upper right- or upper left-hand corner. It just hovers there like some faint star you can’t see unless you look away from it. And even if you do look away, it’s hard to really perceive what it is.