aesthetics

Rhythm & flow in works of prose

October 6, 2009 | 3 Comments

Varying length, structure of sentences fosters voice & musicality. Clarity is a high virtue, but so is beauty; and increasingly I see that it is from varying length and sentence structure that writers achieve voice, rhythm, emphasis, and musicality. Variation works because we naturally vary our speaking rhythm when we’re emotionally connected to what we’re saying: “He fouled me! That jerk! Coach! You’re always telling us This is just a scrimmage—we’re still on the same team—don’t get carried away. Didn’t  you …

[Read More]

Honesty and chronology, part one

September 6, 2009 | 2 Comments

Truth is a disputatious concept in memoir. I’ve said that nonfiction shouldn’t involve invented characters or scenes, unless the author cues the reader to such imaginings, because readers understand the implicit promise in the genre to abjure sleight of hand. But “memory has its own story to tell,” Tobias Wolff argues in introducing This Boy’s Life, meaning that the subjective memories of which memoir is made are the truth. And memories are tumbled in our minds into creative reconstructions to …

[Read More]

Death to dingbats!

August 7, 2009 | 3 Comments

Reading an elegant memoir this week, I became annoyed with the dingbats the publisher inserted in the author’s line breaks, the white spaces he used as transitions between sections in chapters. A dingbat, in this case a set of three square blocks, is “an ornamental piece of type for borders, separators, decorations,” says Dictionary.com. That’s the third definition—the first is “an eccentric, silly, or empty-headed person” and the second is “dingus,” a “gadget, device, or object whose name is unknown …

[Read More]

A meditation upon ‘Infinite Jest’

June 28, 2009 | No Comments

This is a guest post by my son, Tom Gilbert, a college sophomore majoring in philosophy. David Foster Wallace expressed dissatisfaction with the reviews for his ambitious  Infinite Jest. The 1,104-page book is so expansive that any attempt at a plot synopsis is useless; any sweeping thematic summation seems to feel reductive.  However, the novel’s polyphonic structure and character voices are illuminating in its discussion. The novel bears numerous similarities to Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in its character relationships.  Instead …

[Read More]

Against narrative

May 12, 2009 | 6 Comments

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 …

[Read More]

Does writing pay?

March 14, 2009 | 6 Comments

In his recent column in The Week, Francis Wilkinson asks whether professional writing has become an activity for the rich, since almost no one makes meaningful money at it. He notes: “In 1896, Richard Harding Davis went to Cuba to report on what his publisher, William Randolph Hearst, fervently hoped would be a war. Hearst offered the 32-year-old writer $3,000 for a month of work; Davis expected to collect another $600 freelancing for Harper’s Magazine. Davis was a well-known and …

[Read More]

Annie Dillard on structure in nonfiction

March 11, 2009 | No Comments

from “To Fashion a Text,” collected in Zinsser: Inventing the Truth “I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books. In fiction we might say that the masters are Henry …

[Read More]