Monthly Archives: February 2009
Freaknest
I finished Lance Olsen’s Freaknestlast week. Very interesting. It’s easy to call it experimental speculative fiction. It takes place, for example, in a future full of astonishingly Godish technology that doesn’t seem to have solved a single enduring human problem. … Continue reading
Chapter strategies
“Four Approaches to the Chapter” by Paul Graham and Mary Atwell from the Writer’s Chronicle suggests interesting strategies for chapters. As writers move from a rough to revised draft, they have an opportunity to use these and other strategies while building … Continue reading
The Behavior Book and The American Woman’s Home
An important way to increase your understanding of a text is understand its historical and discursive contexts. By historical contexts, I mean answers to questions like what sorts of events were taking place around the time the text was being … Continue reading
Opening (and continuing) with desire
Two quotations from “Silent Movie” by Charles Baxter in his collection A Relative Stranger: She was tired of men’s voices, of their volume and implacability. She had the idea that she would spend the day not listening to any … Continue reading
Controlling knowledge and characters who teach
I finished Cryptonomicon probably two weeks ago. An excellent novel. It ends with an excerpt from Stephenson’s next book and with a system for encoding information. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, if I remember correctly, includes in its narrative … Continue reading
Eavesdropping
Eavesdropping was often mentioned as a source for stories in the first creative writing classes I took. Cell phones have certainly improved opportunities for evesdropping. Overheard fragments of conversations can act as, in the words of They Might Be Giants, … Continue reading
The New-England Primer and Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever
The The Norton Anthology of American Literature,our English 2510 text, points out how The New-England Primer changed as a result of the American revolution and the influence of Puritanism (see page 354 and the footnotes on 355 especially). How similar (or different) are … Continue reading
Metaphor by Metaphor 