craft of writing – Page 2

EP #3*: Favorites from Best American Essays of the 20thC

Thursday, 25 August 2022

My favorites from the Best American Essays of the 20th Century:
The Brown Wasps, Loren Eisley – 1956
Perfect Past, Vladimir Nabokov – 1966
Stickeen, John Muir – 1909
The Search for Marvin Gardens, John McPhee – 1972
Total Eclipse, Annie Dillard – 1982

And essays which weren’t quite favorites, but which I found instructive:
Pamplona in July, Ernest Hemingway, 1923
Putting Daddy On, Tom Wolfe, 1964
The White Album, Joan Didion, 1970

EP #2*: Favorites from Best Am. Essays of 2020

Friday, 27 August 2022

Favorites:
A Street of Splendid Strangers, Leslie Jamison
Driving as a Metaphor, Rachel Cusk
How to Bartend, Rabih Alameddine

Spring 2022 Reading Projects

Friday 22 April 2022

Reading Projects as of Spring 2020:
Survey of English-language Essays, with CT
‘Best of’ Essays – with a focus on the Craft of Writing, with KC
Project 3: Otherlands – Lyrical Science, with CS
Project 4: Smellosophy – Neuroscience, with RB

Things I learned from the 2021 Loft Essay course

16 August 2021

Things to pay attention to:

Telling details: One telling detail is preferable to many details
Embodiment. Emotions and actions work best when embodied: gaze, gesture, posture, proprioception, proxemics
Scenes. Scenes should vary in length, and be interleaved with summaries. This gives rhythm and weighting. Think of a scene as a spotlight.
Language: avoid ‘to be’s. Avoid “is” “are” “have” etc. and limit use of adjectives.
“To be” is the weakest verb. Not “He is tall” but “He smacked his head on the door frame”
Language: avoid distancing: Avoid habitually using filtering/distancing language such as “I noticed,” “I heard,” “I saw,”
(That said, sometimes you may want to use it to distance yourself, as when you are uncomfortable and don’t want to be in it.)
Language: avoid adverbs. Use actions and embodiment rather than adverbs:
“Yeah,” she said, stroking his bare arm, “that’s what I heard.” vs. “Yeah,” she said gently, “that’s what I heard.”
Support reader inference. There is something about readers being able to figure something out on their own that is very rewarding.
Revising Tricks: Print it out in a different font. Read it out loud and notice where you stumble, speed up, lag, etc. Replace “to be’s”

What I’ve Learned from Critiquing SF&F

Wednesday, 21 July 2021

These are observations on what works, from critiques I made during my Summer 2021 Worldbuilding Course

Essays: G. K. Chesterton: family & sociability

Thursday 6 July 2021

I also read CK Chesterton’s essay on the family as an institution. I’d dipped into it before, but read it all the way through and now have my own copy of the book to mark up. He has some funny and acute observations:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In large community we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us.
GK Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity – On Certain Modern Writers, p 10-11

Essays: On first reading G K Chesterton

29 June 2021

Well, it is not my first reading. Long ago, and once or twice since, I’ve read a short story of his in an anthology of fantasy and science fiction. But I had set out to read stories, not Chesterton, and while the story was curious enough to make me remember the author’s name, it did not cause me to seek him out.