Eleventh Sunday Salon 14.00 Reading Like a Writer - Chapter Three: Sentences
An interruption for aerobics, drinking coffee, laundry (I seem to spend a lot of my time doing laundry), lunch and then I settled down to another chapter. This was about word choice and also about what is left out.
I was introduced to several writers I'd not heard of before and have put one of them on my Amazon wishlist (Paul Bowles). It also made me determined to read some Katherine Mansfield.
One important choice a writer makes, she says, is naming the characters because this at once conveys the psychological distance.
She also says that the 'show not tell' adage is confusing and not always appropriate and gives an example of a passage by Alice Munro which breaks this rules to good effect.
I was introduced to several writers I'd not heard of before and have put one of them on my Amazon wishlist (Paul Bowles). It also made me determined to read some Katherine Mansfield.
One important choice a writer makes, she says, is naming the characters because this at once conveys the psychological distance.
She also says that the 'show not tell' adage is confusing and not always appropriate and gives an example of a passage by Alice Munro which breaks this rules to good effect.
posted by Clare Dudman at 2:00 pm
4 Comments:
Charles Baxter in The Art of Subtext is even better on what is implied or left out.
Thanks Lee - another one for the wish list!
And can we do anything about spending too much time on the laundry?
I think about what I'm going to write when I'm folding, but otherwise haven't solved that bugaboo of five people's clothes.
Marly - I have come up with a fool-proof solution, I think become an Elizabethan. I don't think they changed or washed very much at all.
I have only 3 people's clothes here now, before long there will be just two. It's sad - but I suppose I certainly wouldn't want it any other way!
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