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John Baker's Blog

Reflections of a working writer and reader

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel - and isn't that what we're all clamouring for these days? - is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance. Ralph Ellison

Writing - the immediate prospect

Sean Casey at The Kenyon Review muses on the ways that fuel price increases will impact on what we’re reading:

As gas prices continue to rise, writers will be more stationary, more prone to investigating interior landscapes. More authors and, before them, characters will die from bicycle injuries. Poems and stories will smell less of petrol, confine themselves to limited geographies. Writers and writings that travel will do so on mass transit. Email and text message traffic from telecommuters will usurp automotive and postal traffic, boiling letters and words from dialects. Verbs will come with less horsepower, and authors will step with lighter feet on syntactic accelerators. Prose will be more staid, more content to noun around. In and out of books, we will look out more windows. Fingers and feet will do more walking.

And he has a couple of poems on trains.

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1 response to “Writing - the immediate prospect”

  1. § Eli James on May 27th, 2008 at 1:50 pm

    Oh, that’s hilarious, John. Writers will also begin to write more fantasy, and invent lands they’ve never been to.

    jb says: I particularly liked more characters dying from bicycle accidents.

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