It’s a small-scope, deeply immersive novel with a great deal of understated intricacy and thought underlying its premises, executed with an attention to rhetoric befitting a book in which language plays such a prominent role.
Elements of Eloquence Review
For breaking down rhetorical figures, showing them in use, and highlighting how they appear and affect the reader, Elements of Eloquence is a valuable primer and reminder.
The Ode Less Travelled Review
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.
Reaching for Words
I am more aware of the words I am choosing, I think about the writing itself more with each sentence, and that is a problem. It makes me more aware of the gap, makes the gap between the story I want to tell and what seems to be appearing on the page loom larger.
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.
Intimacy and the Unreliable Narrator
Just as real people are inevitably tinted by biases, experiences, backgrounds, opinions, and perspectives, the notional storytellers of our writing are bound by the same tendencies.
Progress and Revisions
I am now being deliberate about developing and implementing the rhetoric I want to see - rather than treating it like an unchanging operating system I can only affect indirectly, I am treating it like an application I can custom-code to my specifications.
IGC Publishing 