“When I embark on a writing project, my characters come to tell me their backstory. Very little of it—perhaps none—might be referred to in the final draft, but it’s there nonetheless, hiding in the decisions that each character makes, driving their reaction to every event. They tell me, these characters, of past incidents, big and […]
Quotation: “characters come to tell me their backstory” Read More »
Pat Barker on Briseis, the main character of the novel The Silence of the Girls, based on the women from Homer’s Iliad: “You can sometimes struggle for months to get the voice of a new character, but Briseis’s voice was there from the beginning, as if she was impatient to make herself heard. If I
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“It’s a strange moment in the culture, rootless and atomized, and we’ve stopped buying into a lot of the default older structures for making sense of the world—the family unit, large-scale religion, duties to some larger moral order. It does feel like the responsibility for meaning has been shifted onto the individual, so I think
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“the actual process of writing a novel is very much like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle. You can’t always see the whole thing at the same time. The more you work, the more it becomes clear. A lot of putting together a jigsaw puzzle is just patience, and looking around for the right pieces. It’s
Quotation: Steph Cha Read More »
“In the past, I’ve always been on the writer’s side, hoping for every book’s success, cheering it on — a habit born of teaching young writers for so many years. But these days, I worry about the poor reader subsisting on clichés and foregone conclusions. I worry about young adult fiction — a worthy genre
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I just reread with my kiddos Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” If the whole world read that and learned those life lessons the world would be a better place. Mark Twain knew what was going on. Source: Books feed the soul. Here’s what restaurateur Mark Canlis is reading | The Seattle Times
Books feed the soul. Here’s what restaurateur Mark Canlis is reading | The Seattle Times Read More »
Sherman-Palladino picked Graham for the part of Lorelai over several more well-known actors, at least partly for her literary acumen. “She’s the first actress that pronounced the name ‘Kerouac’ correctly,” Sherman-Palladino told her husband after seeing her. Source: Why ‘Gilmore Girls’ Endures – The New York Times
Why ‘Gilmore Girls’ Endures – The New York Times Read More »
I hate the phrase “post-truth era,” but truly we’ve stopped agreeing that there is such a thing as truth and that some things are truthful and some things are facts and it’s not a matter of opinion. Opinion is one thing that’s very different from truth and, unless we all can agree that at least
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The New Critics will cry, “Pathetic fallacy,” but I can’t stop thinking that our chaotic weather is a reflection of the country’s mental chaos. –Ron Charles, in today’s issue of “Book Club,” his weekly newsletter for The Washington Post
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