Well, the Alan Wall Guide to Writing has arrived (you can also check out his music here), and skimming through it this morning over my breakfast toast I was already feeling sparked by it. For example, here’s Wall on one of fiction’s key obsessions: ‘Fiction is fascinated by darkness and misfortune, and ‘plot’ is usuallyContinue reading “The weakness / achievement gap”
Category Archives: Literary
Myths to a flame
In ‘Mythologies’, Barthes notes – ‘it is well known how often our ‘realistic’ literature is mythical (if only as a crude myth of realism) and how our ‘literature of the unreal’ has at least the merit of being only slightly so’. Elsewhere, M. John Harrison has pointed out that, as soon as you’ve got aContinue reading “Myths to a flame”
The Wall game
Monday again, and time to think about Alan Wall, as he has a ‘how to’ book on writing out. This is very exciting, because he’s a magnificent writer. First book of his I read was ‘China’, which was hugely enjoyable (in part because it’s very well written, in part because it’s mostly set around fiveContinue reading “The Wall game”
Stasis, dynamism
Well, I drafted an astonishingly perceptive and witty blog entry at home last night, which would have thrilled and amazed everyone as well as instantly doubling my on-site traffic, but I’ve left it on my hard drive at home, so instead of that I’m just going to blast slightly randomly about Cervantes and stasis. There’sContinue reading “Stasis, dynamism”