For his collection, The Norse Myths, Kevin Crossley-Holland worked from “six primary literary sources fundamental to a study of Norse mythology” (xxxvii), though he cautions the reader that our knowledge of the myths suffers from “the filter of literary artifice, fragmented manuscripts, prejudice and contempt occasioned by conflicting religious belief, and hindsight” (xxxvi). His collection [...]
Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson, is an experimental novel about the last human being on the planet. It is devoid of a story in any traditional sense, being more a fictional woman’s meditation on the intertextuality of culture, where Helen and Paris and Vincent Van Gogh have just as much—if not more—reality than the woman’s [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
There’s a thing you have to do on page one of a 1,079 page novel. It’s the same thing you have to do on page 58, page 247, page 496, and even on page 1,078. According to the tennis coach in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, it’s the same thing you have to do on [...]
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