Reflections of a working writer and reader
Nietzsche laments, in Beyond Good and Evil: "What a torment books written in German are for him who has a third ear." If prose is to be as well written as poetry--the old modernist hope--novelists and readers must develop their own third ears. We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality. James Wood in How Fiction Works
Anna is standing behind me in the queue, holding the tv in both arms as if it were a large foal. The shop guy glances at her but addresses me with his eyebrows. Something wrong, sir? We don’t want it, I tell him. It’s crap. A dud. Wish we’d never bought it. Anna puts it […]
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