If you do it properly, you will produce poetry from reading this book. Not good poetry, necessarily, not something you labor over for days and intend to publish to immortalize your name as the next great poet of the 21st century, but poetry nonetheless.
The Narrow Road Between Desires Review
What’s missing from The Narrow Road Between Desires is not conflict, or higher stakes, but a point. It never gives the reader an answer to the question “why am I reading this story?”
Avtandil’s Quest Review
If you were intrigued by my review for The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, but struggled with reading English translations of Rustavelian quatrains, Buell’s retelling is an excellent opportunity to approach the story in a different way.
The Rhetoric of Fiction Review
Several of the posts you’ve been seeing in recent weeks, and several in weeks to come, are prompted or inspired by the time I spent with Booth’s indispensable text. That’s not a word I select lightly.
Saving Your Darlings
To kill your darlings means, during the revision process, to take a hard look at the parts of the story you're particularly passionate about, but which may not serve the overall plot/character/story, and cut them.
Speeches as Poetry
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to give a short speech at a large event. Maybe it could have been more distinctive if I’d had this thought before the speech, instead of about two hours later: I should have treated the speech like poetry.
An Oblique Approach to Reality
Thinking of poetry as an oblique approach to reality reframes my understanding of poems and helps explain why I’ve always struggled with writing original poems, but it doesn’t mean I can suddenly write poetry.
Patterns and Poetry in Prose
With poetry remaining, for now, something of a mystery, I've turned my attention towards instead applying certain poetically derived techniques to my prose.
Description Omission
I’ve recently begun reading Bleak House, a Charles Dickens novel. While I almost always enjoy Dickens novels, with the partial exception of A Tale of Two Cities, the funny thing is that I don’t really read his books for the stories.
Origins of Language Article
This is just a quick post to share an article across which I recently came. It was published in the Wall Street Journal, and since we often discuss linguistics in our posts it seemed worth sharing.
IGC Publishing 