From Satire to Salvation: Exploring Waugh’s Masterwork of Catholic Transformation 🎧Audio Teaching Click Here Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) began his career writing satirical novels in the 1920s and 30s, including Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934). His early work was marked by a biting, cynical wit that skewered British upper classes and their hedonistic lifestyles. His conversion to Catholicism in 1930 significantly influenced his later works, particularly Brideshead...
Carney imagined beyond the façade; he was looking for something inside. Inside the brown stones have remained one family homes, or been cut up in individual apartments, and the rooms were marked by different choices in terms of furniture, paint, color, and what have been thrown on the walls, function. Then there were the invisible marks left by the lives within, those durable hauntings. ~ Harlem Shuffle 🎧Listen to the audio teaching here Handout link A Study in Transforming the Mundane into...
Time Jumps, Linked Stories, and the Art of Character Evolution 🎧Listen to Audio Teaching Here 🧐 Before getting started, ponder a couple questions: Considering Ray Carney’s progression, is this ultimately a tragedy plot? Examine the evidence for both this and other possible plot structures in the text. How does Whitehead’s technique of marking time through personal, political, and social details contribute to both character development and themes of transformation? Look for similar...
“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...
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...
The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.” Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings In Wandering Stars, by Tommy Orange, one of his characters says: Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made. The big question being asked in this teaching is this: What happens when you cannot be taken away because you are too confused by the structure? (From Publisher): The eagerly awaited follow-up to Pulitzer...
How Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Demon Copperhead’ Transforms Victorian Social Critique into a Modern Appalachian Tragedy https://blackbirdstudiopdx.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Copperhead-2.mp4 Concentrated Focus on Demon Copperhead Refresher on Dicken’s version: Previous teaching “What Dicken’s Can Teach You”: HERE Characters David Copperfield: The protagonist, who narrates his life story from childhood to adulthood. Clara Copperfield (David’s mother): A...
From Demon Copperhead to Bridget Jones: How Modern Authors Breathe New Life into Timeless Tales “Nothing is new under the sun. Even the thing of which we say, “See, this is new!” has already existed in the ages that proceeded us.” (From Vanities of vanities/Ecclesiastes 1. “All is weariness”) https://blackbirdstudiopdx.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Copperhead-1-2024.mp4 Introduction – Define Literary reimagining also known as retellings or adaptations, refer to works of literature...
