“Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over,...
“There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.” ― C.S. Lewis. Till We Have Faces 🎧 Listen to the Audio Teaching Here How C.S. Lewis Crafts a Plot Structure as Complex as Faith Itself Till We Have Faces (1956) by C.S. Lewis is a retelling of the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of Psyche’s sister Orual. The book was initially met with mixed reviews by his...
“…bad books get published to support good books by authors like me that you don’t know exist, but have something unique to say that publishers want to support. Bad books get published because publishing is a business like anything else, and those bad books make money.” – B.J. Mendelson. Social Media is Bullshit from St. Martin’s Press. In the complex ecosystem of modern publishing, commercial success and literary craft don’t always align. Marketing...
The goal is not to keep the TICHN cart empty and thus write a “perfectly normal” story. A story that approaches its ending with nothing in its TICHN cart is going to have a hard time ending spectacularly. ~ G. Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain In this Lit Lesson, we expand our teaching about character sketches and profiles/portraits by taking on Victory Lap by George Saunders which shows, brilliantly, three the deeper character creation technique. (NOTE: I’m using the...
From Dickens to Orange: The Enduring Power of Verbal Snapshots “To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” ~ Allen Ginsberg https://blackbirdstudiopdx.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/LL36.mp4 Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange got me thinking a good deal about portraits and character sketches which helps writers develop richer, more nuanced characters in both fiction and creative non-fiction. From Tell it Slant by Brenda Miller and Suzanna Paola: One of the most...
