Tony Ardizzone


Anthony V. Ardizzone is an American novelist, short story writer, and editor.

Biography

Ardizzone was born and raised on the North Side of Chicago. He attended Roman Catholic grammar school and high school taught by the Christian Brothers. He graduated from the University of [Illinois at Urbana–Champaign] in 1971 and from Bowling Green State University with an MFA in 1975. In 1973 he also did a year of graduate study at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
He taught at Saint Mary's Center for Learning, Bowling Green State University, Old Dominion University, Indiana University Bloomington, and the low-residency MFA Progam at Vermont College in Montpelier.
Ardizzone currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

The "Waxing the Floor Metaphor"

In addition to his extensive work as a creative writing instructor, Tony Ardizzone is widely acknowledged to be the originator of the "Wax The Floor Metaphor" for fiction writing, a well-known model for the drafting process of a literary work. Ardizzone's model differs from others' in key ways but is considered by many to be the purest, most authentic version. The metaphor essentially advises students of creative writing to work in stages of complete drafts from beginning to end. Just as it would be ill-advised for a janitor to sweep, mop, wax and buff a single square of a tile floor before moving on to the next and repeating the process, students are warned with this model not to spend time editing and polishing individual paragraphs and chapters before the first draft has been completed and "the entire picture laid out," as novelist John Updike once put it.

Works

Novels

Editor