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George Peram's List: READING & WRITING ADVICE
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Sep 28, 10
"7 Mindfulness Tips to Energize Your Writing"
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Oct 02, 10
"7 Deadly Fears Explored: Too Old To Write
Written by Harry - 7 Comments " -
Nov 06, 10
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Narrative Magazine
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Reading
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* For the best visual quality, please download the PDF.
A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
C. G. Lightenberg
One only reads well that which one reads with some quite personal purpose. It may be to acquire some power. It can be out of hatred for the author.
Paul Valéry
The interests of a writer and the interests of his readers are never the same and if, on occasion, they happen to coincide, this is a lucky accident.
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
To read is to translate, for no two persons’ experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally. In learning to read well, scholarship, valuable as it is, is less important than instinct; some great scholars have been poor translators.
We often derive much profit from reading a book in a different way from that which its author intended but only (once childhood is over) if we know that we are doing so.
As readers, most of us, to some degree, are like those urchins who pencil mustaches on the faces of girls in advertisements.
One sign that a book has literary value is that it can be read in a number of different ways. Vice versa, the proof that pornography has no literary value is that, if one attempts to read it in any other way than as a sexual stimulus, to read it, say, as a psychological case-history of the author’s sexual fantasies, one is bored to tears.
Though a work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously “truer” than others, some doubtful, some obviously false, and some, like reading a novel backwards, absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good dic -
Nov 06, 10
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Narrative Magazine
Home > Content
Writing
* Classics
* Essay
* For the best visual quality, please download the PDF.
It is the author’s aim to say once and emphatically, “He said.”
H. D. THOREAU
The art of literature, vocal or written, is to adjust the language so that it embodies what it indicates.
A. N. WHITEHEAD
All those whose success in life depends neither upon a job which satisfies some specific and unchanging social need, like a farmer’s, nor, like a surgeon’s, upon some craft which he can be taught by others and improve by practice, but upon “inspiration,” the lucky hazard of ideas, live by their wits, a phrase which carries a slightly pejorative meaning. Every “original” genius, be he an artist or a scientist, has something a bit shady about him, like a gambler or a medium.
Literary gatherings, cocktail parties and the like, are a social nightmare because writers have no “shop” to talk. Lawyers and doctors can entertain each other with stories about interesting cases, about experiences, that is to say, related to their professional interests but yet impersonal and outside themselves. Writers have no impersonal professional interests. The literary equivalent of talking shop would be writers reciting their own work at each other, an unpopular procedure for which only very young writers have the nerve.
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
In theory, the author of a good book should remain anonymous, for it is to his work, not to himself, that admiration is due. In practice, this seems to be impossible. However, the praise and public attention that writers sometimes receive do not seem to be as fatal to them as one might expect. Just as a good man forgets his deed the moment he has done it, a genuine writer forgets a work as soon as he has completed it and starts to think about the next one; if he thinks about his past work at all, he is mor-
Writers have no impersonal professional interests. The literary equivalent of talking shop would be writers reciting their own work at each other, an unpopular procedure for which only very young writers have the nerve.
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Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
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It has just written a book that a Major Newspaper trashed, describing how the dog failed, how its work was derivative of writers that in fact the dog had never read so couldn’t possibly have imitated.
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The dog had no faith in itself, no sense of its own artistic integrity.
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Nov 11, 10
Increasing the level of moral ambiguity usually enhances a character’s believability. Only psychopaths do wrong for the fun of it.
Increasing the level of moral ambiguity usually enhances a character’s believability. Only psychopaths do wrong for the fun of it.-
You and Your Characters
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Increasing the level of moral ambiguity usually enhances a character’s believability. Only psychopaths do wrong for the fun of it.
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Nov 12, 10
"Characters, like my armoire, become transformed with more clarity when you scratch beneath the surface. Sometimes through the process of that transformation, the character faces intense struggle and conflict that results in something extraordinary: life is given to the character. The illusions fade as the mystery of the character unfolds."
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On Fiction Writing - Convincing Characterization
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Characters, like my armoire, become transformed with more clarity when you scratch beneath the surface. Sometimes through the process of that transformation, the character faces intense struggle and conflict that results in something extraordinary: life is given to the character. The illusions fade as the mystery of the character unfolds.
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Writing Characterization
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Now, here's the tricky part. Your reader doesn't need to know all this.
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Tuesday, November 23, 2010
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