What I learned at Hollins this Summer

[jadedmetaphor]

I'm home! Now comes time to unpack both my suitcases and mind (the contents of the latter will be filed, below).

Here are the most important things I learned this summer:

Comments

[jadedmetaphor]

Yes, I felt this way before, too... Really, I hope Alexandria's book will be published, soon, because she outlines a lot of terms that I'd never heard before that really have helped me to articulate the "why." For example, one term she uses is "double duty details," which are details that serve two purposes (setting and characterization or character and voice). I know I've read great passages that do this and have a strong economy of words, but I never quite noticed exactly what was happening or had a name for it, until now... I do wonder if the Prose book is as good. I will let you know if I find other books that are helpful.
One thing that helped me this summer was looking at books on craft and then seeing how they apply to texts that have one aspect that works really well. For example, Orson Scott Card has a good book on Character and Voice that I used for an analysis of what makes Laurie Halse Anderson's first person narratives tick. Sorry if this sounds really obvious, but it never occured to me before to research craft articles/books on whatever I had trouble with and then *apply* that research to my analysis while reading like a writer. This is what we did for our assignments and it greatly helped!