April 13, 2007 – 11:28 am
Three desires drive the narration of Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale: the desire to know, the desire to have, and the desire to be. The novel takes place in an America taken over by Christian fundamentalists. It paints life inside a Christian theocracy, and the picture is not much different from life under the [...]
“Words,†Joseph Addison wrote, “when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.” In a book where words are used not only to create and describe a world, but also to populate it, perhaps a writer’s most important word [...]
Written in 1961, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land tells the story of Michael Smith, a human born on Mars and raised by Martians, who arrives on Earth to discover that his ancestral species is alien to him. The novel chronicles the political, spiritual, and social ramifications of his time on the planet using [...]
March 22, 2007 – 10:32 am
There is an exercise that writers sometimes do to gain a better understanding of their characters. They’ll invent back-stories for them, give their characters parents, hometowns, childhood dreams, adult compromises. They’ll pen anecdotes that will never appear in the finished tale. They may even draw a map of the characters’ homes, submerge their mind’s eye [...]
March 20, 2007 – 11:00 am
The Green Mountain Boys: a Historical Tale of the Early Settlement of Vermont was penned in Montpelier, VT in 1839 by Judge D.P Thompson. In 2000, a small press in Weybridge, VT, issued “a new readable version†of Judge Thompson’s classic, with its editors arguing on the back cover that “In our fast moving lives, [...]
March 16, 2007 – 10:48 am
The prime directive given to creative writers — “Show, don’t tell†— is a shorthand way of saying that good writing reveals through action and dialogue, and not through exposition. It is based on the idea that readers want to interpret a text with minimal amount of interference from the author. Instead of being told [...]
Katin shook the nets again. “From star to star…imagine, a great web that spreads across the galaxy, as far as man. That’s the matrix in which history happens today. Don’t you see? That’s it. That’s my theory. Each individual is a junction in that net, and the strands between are the cultural, the economic, the [...]
February 12, 2007 – 11:04 am
In Pan: From the Papers of Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, Knut Hamsun’s narrator, the titular Thomas Glahn, is a classic example of an unreliable narrator. The majority of the novel is Glahn’s account of a brief and jealousy-filled love affair that he once had in Nordland with a woman named Edvarda, but being a jealousy-filled affair, [...]
February 2, 2007 – 11:47 am
There are many lessons in The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard’s trilogy of plays about the early Russian intelligentsia, but perhaps the most important lesson for developing writers is a conflation of revolutionary principles and the artistic process.
Utopia’s protagonist, Alexander Herzen, says in an argument with Karl Marx, “But history has no culmination! There is [...]
January 26, 2007 – 10:42 am
In his political dystopia, 1984, George Orwell writes that Newspeak, the official language of the totalitarian Party in charge of Oceania, is intended “to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent from consciousness†(253). Newspeak provides a Party member “an almost foolproof instrument†(253) to “spray [...]
Now Hearing