Chapter 3 - What to Write About

In Chapter 3 of Writer's Mind © 1995, Richard Cohen discusses what to write about. He lists topics he calls the big subjects: birth, passage to adulthood, love, marriage, work, illness, war, accident, death and he topics he calls institutional subjects: a journey, a prison stay, a job, a school year, a exploration, a life span. The institutional subjects tend to have built in time spans; the story about a journey is defined by and around the timeline for that journey.

Cohen also describes why it is easier to write about unhappy, rather than joyful, events. He says, “Fiction is a magic device for turning pain into joy” and gives this transformation a name: tsuris, a Yiddish word for pain, suffering and trouble. He encourages exploring topics, giving them a chance to see if they develop into stories or not and provides a number of sources for ideas for stories.

This chapter, I’m going to try a slightly different approach to review the works on the bookshelf. Instead of looking at the ways, and how well, each book accomplishes what Cohen describes, I’m going to present ideas for things to write about that the book inspired.

The bookshelf for this chapter is:

• Great Literature from the Bible edited by Joseph Frank
  
• Writer's Block and How to Use It by Victoria Nelson, and
  
• de l'Amour by Stendhal and translated by Philip Sidney Woolf and Cecil Sidney Woolf