Draft No. 4

Noted: David Jauss on flow

October 28, 2008 | 4 Comments

From “What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow,” a chapter in Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft of Fiction Writing— “According to [Virginia] Tufte [in Grammar as Style], ‘The better the writer . . . the more he tends to vary his sentence length. And he does it as dramatically as possible.’ Since variation of sentence length results from varying sentence structure, ultimately it’s our syntax that determines whether our prose flows …

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Noted: Marilynne Robinson

October 26, 2008 | 3 Comments

Interviewed for The Paris Review, Fall 2008, by Sarah Fay. “I don’t try to teach technique, because frankly most technical problems go away when a writer realizes where the life of the story lies. I don’t see any reason for fine-tuning something that’s essentially not going anywhere anyway. What they have to do first is interact in a serious way with what they’re putting on a page. When people are fully engaged with what they’re writing, a striking change occurs, …

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Narrative nation

October 21, 2008 | 5 Comments

A new story rises: Obama’s ascent Literature is fragrant with the compost of human misery. With the never-ending story of our impossible burden. With our failure to reach our promise and with our effort to redeem. Journalism, catching history on the fly, is at its best when it holds our stated ideals (the Constitution, say) beside our practice. When it tugs at the sleeve. Truth be told, though, the press’s daily practical purpose is to supply information (anecdotes and images, actually) …

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A lesson in structure

October 3, 2008 | 3 Comments

The King James Bible’s stories and ancient words and lovely turns of phrase have influenced legions of writers. I’m charmed by its liberal use of sobering colons: like so. And by the nonsensical italics. And there’s Jesus: talk about someone who works on multiple levels. He’s always getting thronged and spied upon—What’s he gonna do now?—and he delights in flummoxing. He speaks in riddles to the dumbfounded masses, though perhaps his rhetorical strategy is to intrigue them and, by using …

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Review: ‘Memoir and the Memoirist’

September 28, 2008 | 7 Comments

The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative by Thomas Larson. Swallow Press. 211 pp. $11.53 As one who loves narrative (reading two essay collections in a row without discernable narrative makes me crazy for story) I found Larson’s chapter “The Trouble with Narrative” fascinating and instructive. Larson casts a gimlet eye on the “crutch” of narrative for memoirists; for one thing, strict adherence to narrative can lead authors into playing with timeline and outright embellishing for dramatic …

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The get

September 18, 2008 | 4 Comments

David Foster Wallace, who died last Friday at age 46, was a genius novelist whose brilliant, personal, reportage-rich essays were celestial events. His account of John McCain’s 2000 campaign in South Carolina against George W. Bush, collected in Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays, is a revered portrait of American politics. My students read his Harper’s stories “Shipping Out,” a mordant tale of his time aboard a luxury cruise ship, and “Ticket to the Fair,” about the baroque experience of …

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Behind the barn

September 14, 2008 | 5 Comments

The story of one family’s Obama barn in backwater Ohio illuminates America’s larger, progressive narrative & ideals. “Everyone’s a story,” my mother used to say. There’s always a story behind the story, too, but usually we don’t get it. However, I know the history of this barn for Obama, only the second so painted in all of Ohio, because my wife’s a Krendl and the barn is on their family farm in the state’s northwestern corner. Theirs is a layered American tale …

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