Words can't express how sad I feel about Mike and Jeri Bishop's loss. They're two of the nicest people in the universe, as was Jamie. Our thoughts and prayers are with them. It just makes me so sad.
JeffV
http://www.sfsite.com has actually run an April Fool's piece this year...
This made me laugh. From soap in a vacuum all the way to Flesh Gordon.
Jeff
I liked the article a lot. Writers are notoriously sloppy when it comes to this type of thing. At the same time, the faults he mentions may not really matter depending on the type of fiction and the style. Or, the weakness actually becomes a strength of the piece by the end.
But I liked the article because it reminded me of the way Nabokov taught fiction. He would deal with the technical issues in a famous work--whether Kafka meant a cockroach or a beetle in Metamorphosis, for example--and make it quite clear that all of these technical choices, all of these "little" things make a big difference in the ultimate success of certain kinds of stories and novels.
JeffV
The problem with most writing advice is that it's anecdotal. Gene Wolfe is right *and* Lawrence Watt-Evans is right. The separate advice they impart works for each of them. It may or may not work for you, depending on the type of writer you are and your temperament.
For me, the entire novel is not *inside*, just the core of it, that which is personal or autobiographical. The rest *accumulates* around me as I write because the novel I'm working on soaks up the world as I experienced it before writing the novel and how I experience it during writing the novel. In some odd way, everything in my environment becomes part of the novel, transformed by it. I forget to shave and wear the same pants for a week and walk around soaking up everything. The way light falls across a sidewalk. The particular way someone in a park holds their arm as they read a book. Stray lines of overheard dialogue. Etc. This interlocks with whatever personal aspect I bring to the novel.
You can't entertain the reader without entertaining yourself, so it is, in a sense, about the writer...and about the reader. And writing should be hard but also fun--it should be fun to sit down at the typewriter and write.
Is it this way for every writer? No. This is just my anecdotal evidence. And the key to teaching creative writing is to take those things about technique that are relatively objective and then sussing out each student's "type" and finding the anecdotal evidence that will help that beginning writer the most.
Re that self-published writer. He's delusional. But a lot of us are delusional in the writing game. It's just a question of what we delude ourselves about.
Jeff
P.S. I think this is my "guess what--the sky is blue and the grass is green" post.
I guess I'm sick of being told the subject of each email is of the utmost importance. It's become a long shriek of no consequence as a result. And, oddly, I'm increasingly angry about getting emails from John Kerry telling me what to do. I voted for him, but even in this odd, impersonal, auto-generated one-way correspondence between him and me, he's beginning to get on my nerves. Everytime I see the subject line "John Kerry Thinks You Should Eat Your Wheaties" or whatever, I get angry, thinking, "You lost, you bastard. And it was partially your fault."
JeffV
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| 2008 | 1 |
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| 2005 | 2 |
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