Draft No. 4

Narrative’s evolutionary roots

June 18, 2009 | No Comments

from Origins of Human Communication, Chaper Six, “The Grammatical Dimension,” by Michael Tomasello “Why do people in all cultures tell stories in the first place? . . . Basically, such sharing is a way of expanding our common ground with others and so expanding our communicative opportunities, and, in the end, making us more like them and enhancing our chances of social acceptance (with conformity to the group playing a critical role in processes of cultural group selection). Telling narratives …

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Narrative Newsweek?

June 13, 2009 | 7 Comments

The newsmagazines’ having-it-both-ways blend of newspaper-style objective conventions and jarring rabbit-punch opinions in their news columns always made me queasy. As a friend said, “I feel like I need to take a shower after reading Time or Newsweek.” But I was a Newsweek man, and hung in there through frequent redesigns. Alarmed at first , I soon accepted the new layout and features because I valued the in-depth and reflective coverage, the trend stories, and some of the columnists. Now …

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Digging deeper

June 7, 2009 | No Comments

from the website of Sandra Scofield a novelist and author of Occasions of Sin: A Memoir “[I]n memoir you’re stuck with a story your history gives you. You don’t have the license to invent in the old, fictional way: you can’t leap to making up things to fill the holes or change the shape of an event. You don’t alter chronology to make a dramatic arc tighter. At least I don’t think you do. What you do instead is dig …

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Review: ‘The Inner Circle’

June 1, 2009 | One Comment

The Inner Circle, a novel by T.C. Boyle. Penguin. 432 pages. T.C. Boyle has a gift for bringing to life historical figures in his fiction. He did it to John Harvey Kellogg in his comedic novel The Road to Wellville, made into a movie by the same name, and he does it more movingly in The Inner Circle, also turned into a film, about Alfred Kinsey, whose sex research at Indiana University transformed scientific inquiry and helped change Americans’ sexual …

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So long, Marshfield Road & Mister Toad

May 28, 2009 | 9 Comments

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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Attention NARRATIVE subscribers

May 23, 2009 | No Comments

I’ve changed email subscription services. New subscriptions will now go through FeedBlitz instead of FeedBurner. If you have an old subscription and your emails from this blog have been arriving in a font too small to read, you can unsubscribe and then resubscribe using the subscription link on the blog’s upper right corner. If you subscribed using an RSS feed to your Google homepage or another web page, this update doesn’t change a thing.

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Edit, or else

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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. …

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