Archive for May, 2010

Keys to conveying experience

May 27, 2010 | 3 Comments

Theorist Peter Elbow urges writers to experience their own words. Writing theorist Peter Elbow believes a key to effective writing is getting readers to breathe “experience” into the words. To accomplish this effect, the writer must first have the experience herself. “Narrative,” he observes, “is a way to get your reader’s attention, but it is a rudimentary kind of attention, mere curiosity about what happens next. It doesn’t make her actually build an experience in her head. Narrative is powerful but …

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On giving readers an experience

May 22, 2010 | 5 Comments

“Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn.  Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one.”—Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Sketches If writers desire readers to breathe life into …

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It’s reading that’s hard

May 17, 2010 | One Comment

Writers complain a lot about how hard their work is. But dipping into Peter Elbow’s 1981 classic Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process (2nd edition, 1998) gave me a new appreciation for what readers are up against. Start with this insight: it’s readers who bring meaning to texts. For every word a writer uses, the reader must supply its meaning, either from pre-existing knowledge or from looking up the damned thing. “Meanings are in readers, not in …

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Reading & writing in the digital age

May 13, 2010 | No Comments

When Steve Jobs presented the iPad recently, The New Yorker reported, “The decision to enter publishing was a reversal for Jobs, who two years ago said that the book business was unsalvageable. ‘It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,’ he said. ‘Forty per cent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.’ ” In fact, computer users have been shifting their non-book reading the …

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Chautauqua Festival June 17–20

May 12, 2010 | No Comments

I visited the retreat in Chautauqua last winter for the first time, and it’s a magical place—an early twentieth-century intellectual spa and retreat where ladies and gentlemen discussed great ideas over tea in old Victorian houses and in stone amphitheaters modeled after Greek temples. The annual writer’s retreat there next month is worth considering, both for the atmosphere and for the workshopping. Each registrant works with one established writer in poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. In nonfiction this year: Jacob Levenson …

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Wot the quid, mon?

May 6, 2010 | 3 Comments

From my son’s blog, Kierkegaard in Me, I’ve learned the word quiddity: the quality that makes a thing what it is; the essential nature of a thing. 2. a trifling nicety of subtle distinction, as in argument. (Unless noted, definitions here are from Dictionary.com.) Wikipedia elaborates: It describes properties a particular substance (e.g. a person) shares with others of its kind. The question “what (quid) is it?” asks for a general description by way of commonality. This is quiddity or …

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Dave Eggers on journalism’s virtues

May 3, 2010 | 2 Comments

Author Dave Eggers burst onto the literary scene with his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; his latest book, Zeitoun, is about the Homeland Security/FEMA ordeal suffered by a Syrian-American immigrant and his family in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Eggers recently gave an interview to Jeff Gordinier for Creative Nonfiction (Spring 2010) in which he talked about the immersion journalism he undertook to report Zeitoun. He talked about the influence of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road …

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