On Valentine's Day, I hoped those who like it too would talk to me about glamour.

via supergee, The Ten Most Harmful NovelsWhile I know I'm not alone is considering Ayn Rand's stuff largely gaseous emissions, I thought I was the only one in the world who thought Cormac McArthur wrote overwrought crapola ( Read more... )

There's an author whose stuff has pretty much always appealed to me, with a couple of exceptions (though those I admired if I didn't enjoy) so when an ARC hit my desk for consideration for this year's Norton Award (the book comes out before December), woohoo, was I excited.
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pjthompson wants to know which is better, having nifty worldbuilding or a nifty voice?.

I’ve been hassling round the snarled topic of rewriting, prose, what constitutes good prose, and so-on, with a fellow writer.
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Buried in work, plus getting ready for exchange student, etc etc.

Goo.

You high-style, literary-salon slumming auteurs will laugh, ha-ha!, at the image of this slub of a visual writer galoshing about in the mudpit of word choice. I spent how long yesterday trying, unsuccessfully, to find a verb for the effect of a shadow subduing the bright ( Read more... )

I'm workshopping a ms that I really love. In fact I'd rather read it than some of this pile of published books (that I've already picked over pretty often). It's not a matter of if this thing will sell, but where. A fantasy, its magic system alone scintillates with kewlness, and then there's there characters! But. I do see something that might ( Read more... )

In the thread about writing fantasy that janni started

here

lnhammer provides one of the most clear, succinct definitions of voice that this fumbler who has never been able to articulate it to her satisfaction has ever seen. I'm gonna quote it, and hope he doesn't mind:

Voice is different from Heart. Voice is (for me) a bag word that collects several ( Read more... )

One of the things recently discussed: it’s even more difficult to define what is, and is not, good literature when our fundamental definition of the purpose of literature is radically different from another’s.

That’s not to say that I believe there is a single definition. I do not. I will only go so far as to posit that my own definition works ( Read more... )

I'm not quite certain I agree, but as usual, Vladimir Nabokov gives in this passage of Bend Sinister us something to think about with respect to translation, particularly of great literature:

It was as if someone, having seen a certain oak tree (further called Individual ( Read more... )