Cheating Writer’s Block

Some claim writer’s block doesn’t exist. If you go all Zen it doesn’t exist but then neither does the writing. I am a pantser so I have no outline or plot when I start. I also write mostly short forms and have way too many fragments that have solid potential in voice or character or situation but are stuck because I can’t see where they are going. When I’m stuck, […]

Goldberg Variations as NaNoWriMo

I am now trying to identify elements of fiction that equate to harmonic progression as well as possibly key and form (matching the series of canons). Number of bars is likely not a big concern as it comes out of the repeated harmonic progression, meaning, retaining the chord progression requires the number and sequence of bars because you cannot extend or shorten one or more chords without destroying the balance […]

Goldberg Variations

Long ago I wrote a paper for a music grad class comparing the two Glenn Gould recordings of the Goldberg Variations, written by J. S Bach. Nowadays I listen to the 1981 release once in a while through a sleep app on my phone. But it wasn’t until last night that I noticed the similarities between the Variations and my fiction writing exercise where I wrote the same scene with the same characters, the […]

Writing Analysis: Cat Person

I’m not a woman and perhaps my perspective will miss the boat for many readers of this wildly popular story published in The New Yorker but my objective is to do writing analysis; there will be no “How To Reply When Asked About ‘Cat Person’” or “My True Life ‘Cat Person’ Experience”.First, a list of elements (not events but factors that reappear, in varied guises, throughout): Acting as trained/expected (previously […]

Lies, and Fiction

Fiction is a lie, or at least an untruth. A good storyteller can make an untruth believable within the world or reality they construct. To become a good storyteller perhaps one needs to be a good liar. To become a good liar perhaps the starting point is to avoid clues that you are lying. # # # If you Google “Forensic Statement Analysis” you find lots of garbage; courses and […]

Composition; musical and fictional

I was a classical composition major in university who came from a self-taught jazz background. Sometimes I think about the differences between writing fiction and writing music. Music has a life of its own. These days if you compose something you probably have a synthesizer and MIDI and you record what you’re working on into a computer. Then you can have it play a version of what you’ve written, let […]

My Recent Reads

So, with the help of my library’s on-line search and my cell phone’s list of downloads I think I’ve managed to collect a list of all the books I’ve read or listened to on the phone during the past fifteen months. In order of author: 1 The Big Sleep – Farewell, My Love… Chandler, Raymond 2 The Antagonist Coady, Lynn 3 Open City – A Novel Cole, Teju 4 The […]

Writing review: The Writing Circle

I’ve read a lot of novels in the past fifteen months, since discovering Aldiko and the resources of my local public library. Not that I didn’t read prior to this period, but with my smartphone and ebooks I’m now able to read not only in bed, but in the bus, in the bathroom, in dentist’s waiting room, pretty much any time I’m alone or want to be. I’d estimate I’ve […]

Writing review: The Hunger Games

My writing reviews have been focused on fiction, but in this case I want to look at “The Hunger Games (Book 1)“, not so much the novel as the movie version. I read the book recently and then saw the movie this past weekend. As always there are the issues of discomfort over what is left out of the novel when it is turned into a movie, but for me […]

Plotting: “Bad Teacher”

Not long ago I watched the movie Bad Teacher. What interested me most, beyond that particular striking wide-eyed attractiveness that is the Cameron Diaz from Something About Mary and Charlie’s Angels, was the plotting. The two central story lines are: Explicit goal or holy grail: in this case it’s money for a breast augmentation operation, which in turn she believes will enable her to marry rich, and, Growth of the […]