Category Archives: flow
Noted: ‘Steal Like an Artist’
Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.—Steal Like an Artist Austin Kleon is a writer and visual artist—collage and sketches and mashups—whose magical new … Continue reading
Filed under aesthetics, discovery, experimental, flow, NOTED, postmodernism
Noted: A moving essay on loss
The current New Yorker (December 13, 2010) includes an essay by Joyce Carol Oates, “A Widow’s Story,” subtitled “The last week of a long marriage,” about the unexpected swift decline and death of Oates’s husband of forty-seven years, the editor … Continue reading
Filed under essay-narrative, flow, memoir, NOTED
Lessons from writing my memoir . . .
Five years ago I began writing a memoir about my experiences farming in Appalachian Ohio. My official start was September 1, as I recall, but I was gearing up at this time of year, in late August, when the common … Continue reading
Filed under braids, threads, design, Dillard—Saint Annie, discovery, editing, film/photography, flow, memoir, MY LIFE, scene, structure, syntax, working method
Rhythm & flow in works of prose
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 … Continue reading
Filed under aesthetics, audience, emotion, evolutionary psychology, flow, structure, syntax, teaching, technique
A nifty concise essay
David Bailey—magazine journalist, restaurant critic and worker, foodie and barista, knockabout North Carolina writer, and my friend—has posted a delightful concise essay, “Daddy Needs a New Pair of Shoes,” on his blog, My Pie Hole. It’s a ramble, with visuals, … Continue reading
Filed under essay-concise, essay-narrative, flow, NOTED, voice
That old fly on the wall
“Dialogue for me is the most effective and most interesting way of defining character, making it unnecessary for the writer to intrude with any song-and-dance routine of his own,” explains literary journalist Lillian Ross in Reporting Back: Notes on Journalism. … Continue reading
Filed under dialogue, fiction, flow, journalism, NOTED, point of view, syntax
Editing, exposed
Lois at her blog Narrative Nonfiction alerts writers to an experiment at Creative Nonfiction in which the editors have published, on the journal’s web site, the before and after versions of some essays in the current print issue. The revisions … Continue reading
Filed under editing, essay-narrative, flow, journalism, memoir, narrative, structure, teaching, technique, theme
Annie Dillard on structure in nonfiction
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 … Continue reading
Filed under aesthetics, creative nonfiction, Dillard—Saint Annie, essay-narrative, fiction, flow, NOTED, poetry, structure, technique
Those cursed teachers
This is from Mike Crognale’s essay about a memorable teacher from his second-grade school days: “There are different members of the Catholic clergy. At the top there is God, everybody knows about that subject. Next there is the pope, and … Continue reading
Filed under emotion, essay-narrative, flow, frosh comp, memoir, point of view, teaching, technique
Noted: David Jauss on flow
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 … Continue reading
