Oh! The Damage to Our Mother Tongue!

Thursday, February 28, 2008

I cannot pass this up!Norm Geras writes in Tradition, tradition:Suppose you set out deliberately to write a column which would be so obviously laughable a decade or three on that it already is laughable, to put together a sad rant about how everything is going to the dogs, you couldn't do much better than the piece I've just read by David Gelernter. It's an 'end of civilization as we know it'

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Writing Achonologically

Thursday, February 21, 2008

You get a little of this and little of that in the Weblog of Norman Geras, including his Writer's Choice series. Here is an excellent piece by Angela Young:I was given a proof copy of Maggie O'Farrell's first novel, After You'd Gone, in 1999. I can't remember why, now. It wasn't for review because I'm not a professional reviewer, and I didn't read it until 2002, at least two years after its

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Resonance through Name-Dropping

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Nobody forgets the first words of Herman Melville's Moby Dick: "Call me Ishmael," because of the Biblical reverberations of that name.You can also achieve resonance through the name of a famous person or historical figure who makes a cameo appearance in the story as a character. Jack Higgins has done this in his novels with great success.

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Hyperbole

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

There are many ways to make writing resonate. They all often employ a simile or metaphor.Here are some ways to make action resonate: Invoke images of some past event that occurred in the same place.Jump-cut between scenes happening simultaneously.Zoom out or in to make an image resonate like the first photos of Earth from outer space did.Those are ideal ways to make writing resonate, because they

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