Monthly Archives: July 2012
Spam Commenters I Love to Hate
Posted on July 27, 2012 13 Comments
I really appreciate when people comment on the blog posts I put up. Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of comments that are spam, though. WordPress automatically recognizes them as spam and puts them into separate location for me to moderate and delete. Until now, I’ve just been selecting all and deleting. But some of […]
Sentences Are the Pack Mules of Literature
Posted on July 26, 2012 2 Comments
On Tuesday, I wrote the post, 100 Most Beautiful Words, and tried to make the case that although words are wonderful, sentences are what’s important. That night, I sat down with Douglas Bauer’s The Stuff of Fiction and read the chapter devoted entirely to the sentence. Some things Bauer said stood out for me and […]
Writing Advice from F. Scott Fitzgerald
Posted on July 25, 2012 3 Comments
Hat tip to Flavorwire for shining a light on this piece of advice published on Letters of Note. It’s from F. Scott Fitzgerald to the aspiring writer at the time, Frances Turnbull, who sent him a story for comment while she was a student at Radcliffe. (The Turnbulls owned a summer house called La Paix, […]
100 Most Beautiful Words
Posted on July 24, 2012 5 Comments
This isn’t my list. But a friend passed it along and I thought it was interesting. It’s one person’s collection of the 100 Most Beautiful Words. I’d have to agree that many of these words roll over the tongue in a pleasing way. Desultory. Efflorescence. Lissome. I love words, but more than that, I love […]
Transgressions as Story Fodder
Posted on July 23, 2012 Leave a Comment
Last week, I attended the Lounge Lit author reading in Cambridge sponsored by the folks at the Boston Book Festival and the literary magazine, the Drum. The theme for the event was Transgressions. Authors read pieces that had to do with lying, cheating, breaking the law and bending the rules. During the break, audience members […]
Emotions Should Lead to Decisions
Posted on July 20, 2012 1 Comment
Here’s a tidbit from the Bookshelf Muse, which I came across this week: Emotions should lead to decisions. Angela Ackerman writes, “Always keep the story moving forward. A character agonizing over a choice will crank up the tension and heighten stakes, but too much will slow the pace. Remember too, often when emotion is involved, […]
Emotion Is Not Always What, But Where
Posted on July 19, 2012 3 Comments
A writer’s ability to evoke emotion is the one skill that separates the greats from the mediocres. I’ve been compiling advice, articles, chapters, blogs posts and more that explain how a write can evoke emotion. So far, all of the examples, tips, and devices and I’ve read explain what to do, and I wrote about this […]
Fiction Should Evoke Emotion
Posted on July 18, 2012 1 Comment
The most important thing a piece of fiction can to do is evoke emotion in the reader. This is the goal of all art, isn’t it? To evoke emotion? The question is, how do the great writers do it? I’ve been digging around on this subject quite a bit lately and I have to say, […]
Get Up Close and Observe
Posted on July 17, 2012 1 Comment
Recently I discovered the wonderful writer, Steven Milhauser. I was struck immediately by the depth of his writing and his ability to paint scenes that not only ground the reader in the moment but also the characters. Here’s an example from his story story, A Room in the Attic: [Wolf] invited me to his house, […]
A Writer’s Apprenticeship in Madrid
Posted on July 16, 2012 3 Comments
In this week’s issue of the New Yorker, I found a wonderful piece called “The Hunger Diaries,” by Mavis Gallant, the Canadian short story writer and novelist. The article is a collection of her journal entries written between March and June 1952, when she was living in Madrid. Gallant was a fledgling fiction writer in […]
Tracy Staedter 