One theory why Dan Brown writes so badly

Dan Brown is infamous in the world of grammarians. One of my favourite resources, It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences: A Writer’s Guide to Crafting Killer Sentences, criticizes the first sentence of “The Da Vinci Code” Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. The author, June Casagrande, questions whether “vaulted” adds anything useful to “archway”, but she […]

Writing in Sentence Fragments

Sentences are supposed to contain a subject and an object. Incomplete phrases should be included in the same sentence as the main clause, joined to it by commas or semicolons or the like. Paragraphs should be built from related sentences, and split when you change speaker or focus. Them’s the rules.   A deception.   Not a complete sentence. Used — not only as a complete sentence — but it […]

Using the Unreliable Narrator

I thought it was going to be easy. I thought it would be obvious. I decided to use an unreliable narrator in my writing exercises blog. I thought the result was interesting, so I worked some more with it and showed it around for critique.   A narrator can be unreliable by lying, or by not providing information and lying by omission. When you discover that the central character of […]

Writing Review: Divergent, and other YA

More results from my project of working through some top reading lists. Next up: Divergent, by Veronica Roth. Divergent comes right after Looking for Alaska, and having speed-read The Hunger Games the weekend before seeing the first movie, and Blink & Caution a year or so back, all good YA genre novels. Blink & Caution is probably the most challenging read because it’s written from two alternating perspectives— those of […]

Technique, and Rock and Roll

At some point — somewhere around one or two years ago — I made a conscious effort to focus less on larger elements and to pay attention to how I worked with phrases, sentences, paragraphs; the elements of writing in general as opposed to the elements of a novel or of fiction that you learn in school. My theory was that the larger inspirations could be explored and developed at […]

Goodreads reading

I’m still working on my project; reading through various titles of a Goodreads list. My object is to sample recommendations from various genres with minimal bias or preparation. Since I’m reading only e-books downloaded from the library I don’t see the summary notes on the inside jacket, the glowing reviews, or more about the author. Just a cover, the title, and the author’s name. Reading e-books is different than reading […]

Writing a Character Driven Novel

I’ve completed four novels to date, all connected with some form of writing competition; three NaNoWriMos and one 3DayNovel; a 23,500 word submission which subsequently expanded into a 60,000 word novel. The one that I’m working on now is the first non-competition generated novel. It’s also the most character-driven and has some of the thickest writing that I’ve done other than in some short stories. Thick meaning dense; the words […]

The Kefuffel over Alice Munro

Back on September 25, the author and literature instructor David Gilmour was quote as saying in an interview, I’m not interested in teaching books by women. I’ve never found—Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one short story from Virginia Woolf. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would teach only the people that I […]

Tiresome critiqing

Many of us fiction-writing types belong to one or more critiquing exchanges. Stephen King has his wife and a writing friend that review his works. Writing classes or workshops are, in whole or in part, made up of reviewing and critiquing the efforts of the participants. I belong to a local writing group and loosely to a couple online groups (one forum, one email). Right now I’m finding critiquing difficult. […]

Writing in italics

I’ve heard some discussion about the use of italics, and today I ran across an example of what I think it a good use of italics in my current reading. This excerpt is from A Wanted Man: A Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child. McQueen waited. Reacher looped around the trunk. He paused, gestured, right-handed, open palm: Go ahead. After you. A precaution, not politeness. A precaution, because Reacher wants […]