Was just reading that four vaults worth of unseen Kafka are to be opened as part of an ongoing tussle for ownership. The condensed version: Max Brod, close friend of Kafka, was left all of the Czech (or, more accurately, Austro-Hungarian) neurotic’s scribblings. Kafka wanted him to burn them. Instead, Max published many of the [...]
Used some viral writing analysis tool on a chunk of my prose. This is what it came up with: I write like Chuck Palahniuk I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing! I’m not putting too much stock in this. It also told me I write like James Joyce and Stephen King.
Pinched from Virus Comix, I want to have this illustration blown up and used as wallpaper… Click to embiggen. http://www.viruscomix.com/page523.html
In the first year of my MA, I remember a workshop discussion kicking off about whether the chapter I’d just presented was fantasy. People were using names like China Meiville and Michael Moorcock. It came as a surprise to me. I thought I was just writing fiction. Perhaps I was naive: the chapter contained a [...]
In 1971 the Booker switched from being a retrospective of the previous year’s pile of letters to the cutting edge taking of the literary pulse it aspires to be. So, while the prize was still run in 1970 and 1971 – the books that were shortlisted came from 1969 and 1971. A year was missed [...]
People (tutors, writers, other students) have told me the same thing in different configurations: “Characters drive the narrative!” I nod. I agree. I go back to quietly and tightly plotting and planning every aspect of the novel I’m writing – because, actually, I don’t really believe it. I read interviews with writers who say they [...]
I’m reading “The Catcher in the Rye” for the fifth time – following on from a week dipping into Borge’s short story collection “Labyrinths”, The contrast between these two experiences has been instructive. One of the themes of Labyrinths is the structuralist idea of reader as author. Borges parodies the notion, belittles and criticises it [...]
Some notes on narrative that, in best Blue Peter tradition, I made earlier. 16 years earlier: Narratives are made up of units of information. In Roland Barthes’ ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’ he states: “…narrative is never made up of anything other than functional units … This is not a matter of art [...]
Decided to do my first semester essay on variable, internal focalisation in Madame Bovary. Want to explore the structuralist roots of perspective as Genette’s Narrative Discourse, the set text, refers to Barthes Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative a lot… And I love a bit of Barthes. Anyway, for my benefit, here’s a beginner’s [...]
Ploughing through the first pages of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, I’m reminded of several other artists, not all of them writers. The first is Jack Kerouac. The stream of consciousness narrative, poetic and vibrant real-time description and epic sentences. Full stops are few. My first attempt at reading was fruitless. Only going back and reading [...]