Because our time here so close to DC is winding down and we wanted to feel we had done some little something as opposed to nothing at all we spent a few days in DC and on Saturday added our voice to those protesting the war in Iraq. Thursday, we heard Jonathan Harris speak about [...]
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Steven Poole has it right: believability is not a replacement for accuracy in language. How believeable is it? is a question for fiction writing workshops, wherein authors are creating a fiction. Writers manipulate language to get readers to suspend disbelief. Believability is a measure or a value for fiction, a deliberate artifice.
More about Poole’s Unspeak [...]
Or The rest of us clothed.
Remember, Creative Writing 101, the idea of creating a new version of The Metamorphosis, most typically a la the cockroach? Someone has actually taken his idea the whole way, and according to this review, done it well.
At first, it seems like Kockroach is going to be one of those blandly [...]
Thursday, January 18, 2007
So the criques you get for your stories go something like But nothing happens! Solution: a world map of dangers in real time. You’ve got your biological hazards, epidemic hazard — which are not the same as epidemics –nuclear events, chemical accidents, technological disasters. Power outages, fires. Vehicle accidents. Floods, extreme weather, snow storms, [...]
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Miles Kington reveals “how to write a book review.” Essentially,
It’s much like writing a novel, except that instead of telling people about characters, the idea is to tell the reader all about YOU
Further,
Evelyn Waugh once said that the golden rule of book reviewing is that you should never give a bad review to a book [...]
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
maybe. Interview with John Ashberry, Well Versed.
Q: In the past few years, poetry sales have reportedly been climbing, perhaps because a poem appeals to shortened attention spans.
Ashberry: That’s true. It doesn’t take so long to read a poem, and if you need a quick fix or consolation, you can get it.
Other notes:
Q: Do you think [...]
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
See Salon story on Destination: Gypsy Europe. Despite their historical distrust of the written word, Europe’s Gypsies have a growing — and captivating — literary tradition.
When he walked off toward a ramshackle shed, leaving the book on the ground, I strolled across to see what he had just smoked — a Slovak translation of the [...]
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Gaping Void/Hugh McLeod’s How to be creative is still getting notice, he reports. Deservedly. Major points quoted below, but you have to read the entire thing. I like what he says about writer’s block:
If you’re looking at a blank piece of paper and nothing comes to you, then go do something else. Writer’s block is [...]
To read a first-person narrative too often involves being clamped in an embrace by a writer who means well but insists on meaning too much. The banality of ego.
–Peter Stevenson reviewing Calvin Trillan’s About Alice (NYT). He doesn’t mean Trillan with this book; refers to it instead:Â Sometimes we come across a piece of first-person [...]
Thursday, January 11, 2007
John Keats, who knew a thing or two about truth, and beauty, characterized the creative state as being devoid of “any irritable reaching after fact and reason.â€
Read If art is a lie, then tell me a tale (Steven G. Kellman)