This summer Kathy and I have been enjoying our morning coffee out on the front porch. Mockingbirds, my favorite songbird from my southern boyhood, flit even this far north—they are the royalty of our hilltop—and we can watch them hunt insects in the gravel driveway and eat holly berries beside the porch, and then we can look at Marshfield Road that runs below our farm. The curving country lane is a story: What’s next? This stretch is haunted by my …
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from “Copyediting. Vital. Do It or Have It Done,” in Brevity’s Craft Essays, by Diana Hume George, author of The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America and other books. “In my capacity as a screener, I automatically reject any book or essay that does not honor the conventions. It doesn’t matter how good the content is. Editors won’t waste their time fixing matters that should have been attended to long before the writer sent it out as a professionally finished product. …
I have a guest post on Brevity’s blog discussing the narrative and structural choices I made in my essay “Kathy,” published recently by Brevity. I first analyzed the piece here, and so with the Brevity blog exegesis—not to mention this notice—I have now written more words about the essay than are in the essay itself. I could go on. Which gives me the notion that writers might begin the practice of publishing essays that comment on their essays, books that …
from David Denby’s review of State of Play in the April 27 New Yorker: “State of Play,” which was directed by Kevin Macdonald, is both overstuffed and inconclusive. As is the fashion now, the filmmakers develop the narrative in tiny fragments. Something is hinted at—a relationship, a motive, an event in the past—then the movie rushes ahead and produces another fragment filled with hints, and then another. The filmmakers send dozens of clues into the air at once, but they …
From Anthony Lane’s review of Star Trek in the May 18 New Yorker:
In all narratives, there is a beauty to the merely given, as the narrator does us the honor of trusting that we will take it for granted. Conversely, there is something offensive in the implication that we might resent that pact, and, like plaintive children, demand to have everything explained.
Shakespeare could have kicked off with a flashback in which the infant Hamlet is seen wailing with indecision as to which of Gertrude’s breasts he should latch onto, but would it really have helped us to grasp the dithering prince?
In the About section of this blog devoted to narrative, I used to fret that narrative seems to inhibit reflection, or at least is in tension with other ways of exploring meaning: I’d noticed in writing a memoir the pressure of the constant “and then” of the story. But a friend questioned what I meant and I couldn’t defend my tentative insight. So it was exciting to see a writer boldly go there—in fact he mounted a sustained attack on …