John Baker’s Blog

James Wood on Guardian Unlimited talks about character:
But how to push out? How to animate the static portrait? Ford Madox Ford writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running - what he calls “getting a character in”. Ford and his friend Joseph Conrad loved a sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: “He was [...]

1.Why do you blog?
I maintain a weblog in order to:
. . . sustain & develop further a unique form of communication that enables me to write in reflective solitude in the traditional way, but also enables me to locate & interact with a critical readership almost immediately.
. . . be able to read across a [...]

SURREALISTS & SYMBOLISTS
The Surrealists stood against everything which mutilates man’s inner life, or stifles his imagination for the sake of peace and quiet, law and order and the smooth running of the social machine.
Surrealism constantly poses the question: Whether in the eyes of the society in which we live, the ‘compleat person’ is a ‘crime [...]

It is mooted from time to time that place in fiction can be seen as a character acting within the movement of the narrative. One thinks of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or of EM Forster’s Marabar Caves. Classically there are the examples of Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford, of Joyce’s Dublin and Conan Doyle’s London, while closer to [...]