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Winged with Death Reviews
Certainly the short story has always been more flexible and open to experiment than the novel. Short-story writers always have been subject at the same time to both a stricter technical discipline and a wider freedom than the novelist. Short-story writers have known - and solved by nature of their choice of form - what novelists seem to have discovered in despair only now: the strongest convention of the novel, prolonged coherence of tone, to which even the most experimental of novels must conform unless it is to fall apart, is false to the nature of whatever can be grasped of human reality. How shall I put it? Each of us has a thousand lives and a novel gives a character only one. For the sake of the form. The novelist may juggle about with chronology and throw narrative overboard; all the time his characters have the reader by the hand, there is a consistency of relationship throughout the experience that cannot and does not convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be sure of - the present moment. Ideally, they have learned to do without explanation of what went before, and what happens beyond this point. How the characters will appear, think, behave, comprehend, tomorrow or at any other time in their lives, is irrelevant. A discrete moment of truth is aimed at - not the moment of truth, because the short story doesn't deal in cumulatives. Nadine Gordimer

53 Search results for “learning to write”.

Learning to Write XXXI

john baker, June 12th, 2007. One comment.

How do you weed out characters that aren’t earning their keep? A character doesn’t earn his or her keep when they do nothing interesting with or in opposition to the leading characters in your narrative. If they are your leading characters you need to stop writing and return to the stage of thinking about your […]

Learning to Write at Hay

john baker, June 2nd, 2007. 8 comments.

Fifty people turned up in the Drill Hall for the Hay-on-Wye Writing Workshop, quite surprising when you consider that the fee was £25.00 per head for a two-hour session. Maybe billing it as a practical masterclass in the Festival Programme did the trick? The high entrance fee also begged the question of who would turn […]

Learning to Write XXX

john baker, May 15th, 2007. 2 comments.

In casual conversation all speakers slur vowels, drop final consanants and take short-cuts through syntax. Don’t tell me this only occurs with people on the lower rungs of the social scale. If you believe that, you haven’t learned to listen yet. In the latest post in this series I suggested that speech transferred to the […]

Learning to Write XXIX

john baker, May 7th, 2007. 6 comments.

Try writing down a paragraph as spoken by someone with a foreign accent. Or write down five or six sentences spoken by someone in your family. In both cases you will find that your listening ability is limited to grasping the meaning of what the speaker says and to more or less disregard his or her way of saying it.

Learning to Write XXVIII

john baker, May 1st, 2007. 5 comments.

I’ve managed to avoid talking about dialogue in this series up to now, but eventually it has to be dealt with. I don’t think it’s possible to deal with it adequately in one post. So what I have to say will be supplemented later by a couple of additional posts. It is a complicated subject […]