OK, now getting close to the end of Week One of the book edit. I’ve hit all the 6 a.m. mornings, so feeling quite proud of myself. However, the problem of voice and style, and in particular tense have been troubling me much. I have four narrators and they refuse to stick to one timeContinue reading “A Question of Tense”
Category Archives: Narrative Structure
A Return to the Blog (and a return to the novel)
So here’s the thing: I haven’t posted much in a long while, but I have a good excuse: I’ve been working on the first draft of a new book. Well, not so much a first draft as a zeroth draft: 90,000 words of unconnected vignettes that don’t hang together. No change there, you might thinkContinue reading “A Return to the Blog (and a return to the novel)”
The Suspension of Disbelief
Given all the stuff I’ve written in previous blogs about how language and narrative works, here is an interesting question: how does the author use the text to convince us to suspend our disbelief? After all, one of the most important things about any story is that we should believe that it is true, atContinue reading “The Suspension of Disbelief”
More About My Struggle With Poetry
So, on Thursday night, I was listening to someone read a poem about a rocket disaster (don’t ask me the reason, it’s too complex). The poem began with some beautiful imagery about the preparations for launch, then switched, two-thirds of the way through, to some very factual sentences reporting the disintegrating situation that led to allContinue reading “More About My Struggle With Poetry”
