Quoteskimming
Today's icon comes from Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, and is one of Feste's lines (an insult directed at Malvolio).
Looking into my file entitled "quotes for quoteskimming", I found this bit from the lovely and talented annastan. First, a quote from Wendy Maass that I found on her website, then Anna's thoughts on the matter. You can read the whole post here:
Wendy Maass quote:
Are sidekicks useful in other types of novels? Young adult novels are replete with best friends, which is natural to the social structure of high school. Epic or quest fantasy is another type of story that can hardly seem to do without sidekicks. In other types of novels, though, I have found that sidekicks do not often fit in. Why? Because for the most part, the hero's problems are personal; or at any rate the plot is more effective when it is the hero and the hero alone who can solve the main problem. Isolating your hero is generally a good idea.
Anna's thoughts:
I found the idea of isolating your hero particularly interesting when thinking about MG and YA books. Although Maass says that sidekicks are often found in YA novels, I would say they're much more prevalent in MG; this seems to be true both of speculative fiction and of realistic fiction. This could be because feelings of isolation tend to be something we associate more with teens than with children. Also, MG novels are often about forging relationships, so there's plenty of opportunities for sidekicks.
Other than that, I confess that my file was empty. I will, however, share with you this quote from the March/April 2010 issue of Writer's Digest, a quote from Nate Pritts, poetry editor of H_NGM_N:
I suppose I would encourage poets to realize that writing a poem is a small portion of what they owe to Poetry. A Poet doesn't just write poems. A Poet starts a journal or starts a press. A Poet gives a reading or organizes a reading. A Poet reads poems - thousands of them. A Poet cares about your poem as much as they care about their own.
And a wee thing from my commonplace book - a quote from the movie Hamlet II:
"You can't stop art."
Looking into my file entitled "quotes for quoteskimming", I found this bit from the lovely and talented annastan. First, a quote from Wendy Maass that I found on her website, then Anna's thoughts on the matter. You can read the whole post here:
Wendy Maass quote:
Are sidekicks useful in other types of novels? Young adult novels are replete with best friends, which is natural to the social structure of high school. Epic or quest fantasy is another type of story that can hardly seem to do without sidekicks. In other types of novels, though, I have found that sidekicks do not often fit in. Why? Because for the most part, the hero's problems are personal; or at any rate the plot is more effective when it is the hero and the hero alone who can solve the main problem. Isolating your hero is generally a good idea.
Anna's thoughts:
I found the idea of isolating your hero particularly interesting when thinking about MG and YA books. Although Maass says that sidekicks are often found in YA novels, I would say they're much more prevalent in MG; this seems to be true both of speculative fiction and of realistic fiction. This could be because feelings of isolation tend to be something we associate more with teens than with children. Also, MG novels are often about forging relationships, so there's plenty of opportunities for sidekicks.
Other than that, I confess that my file was empty. I will, however, share with you this quote from the March/April 2010 issue of Writer's Digest, a quote from Nate Pritts, poetry editor of H_NGM_N:
I suppose I would encourage poets to realize that writing a poem is a small portion of what they owe to Poetry. A Poet doesn't just write poems. A Poet starts a journal or starts a press. A Poet gives a reading or organizes a reading. A Poet reads poems - thousands of them. A Poet cares about your poem as much as they care about their own.
And a wee thing from my commonplace book - a quote from the movie Hamlet II:
"You can't stop art."