What phases are involved in the creation of a text?
For me, creation of a text works like the physiology involved in pregnancy and child birth.
First trimester: There is conception, the slow formation of vital parts, excitement, fear, and maybe some nausea.
Second trimester: A narrative forms–like feeling the baby kick: a rough draft makes its way onto the page, and the writer can glow with this fulfilling sensation of bringing something into being.
Third trimester: The added weight and looming responsibilities start to grow uncomfortable and final intense efforts are needed to master the text. It takes hours, lots of patience, and an iron willpower that assures a writer remembers to breathe; however, if the text can’t be given a natural birth then it takes surgeon-like skill to split a writer’s head open with a knife; the story is yanked out of the womb of the mind, and the writer is stitched up again.
Either way, the whole process involves long recovery in the aftermath.
Rebecca Jane is a writer; she blogs at: http://rjaneflashfiction.blogspot.com
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The Brazilian artist, Icaro Doria, is part of the team behind the Meet the World campaign, which has been running since January 2005. [...]
The opening is astounding. Some three to four pages of small print in which Camus attempts to describe his Oran, the setting of the novel. The following is an extract:
Certainly nothing is commoner nowadays than to see people working from morn till night and then proceeding to fritter away at card tables, in cafes, [...]
I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;
And, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
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Considering [...]
Thomas Allen cuts out figures from the covers and interior pages of books and sets them up in alternative compositions.
This one is called Topple.There’s more in The Georgia Review.
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Tom McCarthy’s article in TimesOnline takes mainstream publishers to task:
. . . the art press Bookworks has just commissioned a series of novels to be guest edited by the artist-writer Stewart Home; the art publisher Sternberg Press recently won acclaim from the TLS for Bedlam, a novel by Jennifer Higgie, the editor of the [...]
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