Category Archives: audience
Finding ‘Narrative,’ ver. 1.2
Blog reading has displaced some of my discretionary reading. It’s probably one reason I don’t follow the news as closely anymore. Writers must read what others in their genre are doing, though I’d been posting for almost two years before … Continue reading
Stylist nabs National Book Award
I was glad to see a dark-horse novel, Lord of Misrule, by Jaimy Gordon, win the National Book Award recently for fiction. I hadn’t heard of the sixty-six-year-old author, and neither had a lot of folks. But I ordered her … Continue reading
Filed under audience, fiction, immersion, narrative, research, style, teaching, working method, workshopping
A novel on memory, story & alibi
A colleague here at Otterbein University, Noam Shpancer, a psychologist, has just hit the big time at age fifty-one with his first novel, The Good Psychologist. Early reviews are positive to raves: Kirkus gave it a starred notice, Alan Cheuse … Continue reading
Filed under audience, braids, threads, design, editing, fiction, memoir, NOTED, REVIEW, working method
Any memoirist’s dilemma
“A fundamental dilemma for autobiographical essayists is how exactly to navigate between the necessity to write and the sinking realization that it may not really matter to anyone else. All writers, all artists, deal with this problem, of course, especially … Continue reading
Filed under audience, essay-personal, journalism, memoir, NOTED, subjectivity
Keys to conveying experience
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 … Continue reading
Filed under audience, editing, essay-expository, frosh comp, narrative, scene, working method, workshopping
On giving readers an experience
“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 … Continue reading
Filed under audience, scene, working method
It’s reading that’s hard
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. … Continue reading
PowerPoint’s infamy grows apace
Having gone on record against the narrative-killing malevolence of PowerPoint (“Unsure? Tell a story . . .”), I was pleased to see that the most popular story in The New York Times this week documents military commanders’ disgust with the … Continue reading
Filed under audience, evolutionary psychology, narrative
