I’ve always had difficulty finding enough good stuff to read. During the last three or four years I’ve been working my way through Pulitzer, Man Booker, and other award finalist collections, treating the lists as recommendations. Now I’m trying a new compilation; Google’s list of top books for 2012. I know nothing about these books. I download them from the library so I don’t see reviews or summaries, just the […]
Review: And When She Was Good
Review: Gone Girl
Just finished reading “Gone Girl“. It sticks in my mind, and I’m not sure why, so I’m going to see if I can figure it out. One element about it; it strikes close to the balance that I’ve been striving for between literary and genre. Decent writing, decent characters, decent plot, and characters and plot titillating enough to carry casual readers. But writers have always found ways around that, most […]
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 […]
Critiques
It’s amazingly hard to accept and to do critiques. When I was a music major I always had a teacher; someone that knew a lot more than I did, someone who had years more experience than I did, someone that I trusted. After years of work with the instructors, with the directors, I developed a sense of rightness, of understanding, an ability to see the gaps between was is and […]
Translating = Editing?
I don’t understand any language other than English. But I have read some translations: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert mostly, and others. Last year I met an author whose first language is French but he writes in English. I asked why he doesn’t translate his works himself, and he replied that writing fiction is one thing, translating is another. But he’ll happily argue with his translator. I also read a book on […]
Improvising
Some time ago an experienced writer told me that he imagined that writing fiction is like improvising jazz. Then he asked me, as a (hobby) jazz musician and budding fiction writer, did I find that to be the case? I said that, as also a legit (classical) composition major in university, I felt that writing fiction is more like composing. To compose I do a similar process that I use […]
Weaknesses, of a writing style
I have a few writing tendencies which are weaknesses. I’d like to understand their source so that I can figure out how to manage them. One is the over use of the word “but”. One person that I mentioned this to suggested that I consider alternative words like ‘however’, but that’s not a good answer because I’m writing fiction, not a research paper and most alternatives to “but” are too […]
Richard Ford: Canada
I’m reading Richard Ford’s “Canada” atm, and noting how different this is as a reading experience for me, compared with “Rabbit Is Rich“, by John Updike, the last novel that I read. First off, I’ve read Updike before, and even read that Rabbit novel before, whereas I haven’t read any Richard Ford before, so I have to read for content, for the story, which I didn’t have to do with […]