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Category Archives: Shibboleths (for writers)
On 2001 after 50 years
When my work is on the table at a writers’ group meeting the first question I hear from young writers who still need to be propped up is the old shibboleth “Who’s your audience?” To this I say, if I’m … Continue reading
Posted in How to write, Shibboleths (for writers), storytelling, Uncategorized
Tagged ambiguity in fiction
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You can quote me on this
You can quote me on this You can turn off the background music with the button in the upper right corner. One button is the Chinese character for chi, breath or life. The other is a crushed chi.
Audience
——————————————————————– Find your reader (again) Who do I write for? Other people or myself? Do I give myself problems to solve and work out ingenious solutions for my personal amusement?. Do i really care when readers don’t understand? — these … Continue reading
Comma fault
——————————————————————– I take a lot of grief for not knowing where the commas are supposed to go, and for punctuation generally. I don’t put speech in quotes unless it’s reported speech, and in my stories it isn’t.But the most important … Continue reading
More on hard books
————————————————————————– Some time back I pondered the issue of why some books are hard to read. At that time I was particularly interested in difficult styles. But of course there are other reasons why a book might be hard to … Continue reading
The narrow road into the interior
Narrative objects I decided recently, after seeing an exhibit of the Argentine artist Antonio Berni’s work at the Phoenix Art Museum, that it was now time for a re-orientation of my own work. Berni (among other things) for many years … Continue reading
Mad about you
MAD ABOUT YOU I’ve decided to stop being angry about little art. It will never do to disparage something. One is too likely to find oneself the victim of one’s own criticism. Besides, big art may be aspired to but … Continue reading
Shibboleths for writers: 7
Know your audience A while back I posted some remarks on “Hard books” [28 Feb 2014] Part of the undertext there was the question of whether you should modify your writing when some people who might have been your readers … Continue reading
Posted in Big art and little art, Novels, On the State of the Civilization, Shibboleths (for writers), Uncategorized
Tagged audience, big art, creative writing, find you audience, For a new novel, know your audience, novels, resonance, science fiction, shibboleths for writers, The Arrow
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Shibboleths for Writers: 6
What has this all been about? About getting at the origins of story, the human awareness of the numinous world and the efforts to tell the discovery of the beginning and end of human life. We are not telling … Continue reading
