Into the Grey Zone. . .
Want a brief escape from the gaudy mirth of Christmas? Fancy a tinsel-free zone? For this second of a short series on the relations between photography and fiction, I take you into the shadow-filled, melancholic world of W.G. Sebald’s fiction, and show how his powerful use of photographs draws on wider, deeper links between photography…
Photography and Fiction (I)
This is the first of a planned short series of blogs on the relationship between fiction and photography. My interest in this topic is creative rather than merely antiquarian or academic – hopefully, these blogs will provide reflections that could be useful for anyone, like me, interested in the possibilities of combining the two forms.…
Inside Out: How Novelists Reveal Characters’ Feelings
Fiction’s distinctive magic lies in its ability to transport the reader seamlessly from the external action of the story into the most private and intimate thoughts and feelings of a character, sidestepping the clunkiness of filmic voiceover or dramatic Shakespearean soliloquy. Take the following passage from Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) – it comes at a…
Metaphor – Thinking with the Body
Is literary theory useful for the creative writer? IMHO it can often actually have an inhibiting effect. The reason for this, I think, is that most academic literary criticism is primarily concerned with texts – analysing texts, placing texts in historical contexts etc. For the creative writer, on the other hand, things are rather different. …
The Long and Short of It
As any bona fide bookworm will confirm, deciding what to pack for holiday reading is the most painful of First-World dilemmas. This year, the decision was in part made for me, because I was already halfway through Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. And there was no way I wasn’t going to finish it. As for what…
We Need a Conversation About Conversation
In my book, writers have a responsibility to be a bit precious about words. This doesn’t necessarily mean fusty traditionalism, or a King Canute-like resistance to the fluid, ever-changing nature of our language – it just means a certain hygiene and clarity. Think of it like linguistic flossing. . . The word “conversation” is everywhere…
Two Poems
June has hunted me down and found me in a poetry mood. . . Here are two (fairly) recent ones: Liberation My friend Michael #sciencefictionpoet #manusupporter #messiaenlover Caught by an algorithm On the Upper West Side Transported to Jiangxi To live a different life Free of illusions Now he whorls slyly In a waterfall of…
It was all a dream. . .
This month we enter the twilight zone where reality, dream and fiction join hands and dance together. . . To start with the familiar world of everyday “reality”: dreams are an integral and universal part of human experience – men and women have always dreamed, whether they like it or not. We’re not concerned here…
Is the Reader the Writer’s Only Friend?
The other day, I came across this entertaining passage, from Paul Theroux’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Paul Bowles’s celebrated novel The Sheltering Sky. Theroux reproduces an extract from his notebook, written in a café in Tangier right after meeting Bowles: He seems to me a man who masks all feelings: he has a…
What is “head jumping”? Why do novelists do it? Should they stop doing it?
Head jumping (or “head hopping”) occurs when a novel jumps, within a particular scene or stretch of narrative, from one character’s internal thoughts and perspective to those of another. The “within a particular scene” qualification is important, to distinguish head jumping from the kind of multi-perspective novel in which switches of point-of-view are clearly delineated…
Did the Ancient Greeks Invent Speculative Fiction? And Why It Might Matter. . .
Imagine an elevator-pitch along these lines: The Diana, Princess of Wales, who died in the car crash in the Paris underpass was not the real Diana Spencer, but a clone manufactured in a secret facility with the connivance of rogue elements in British Secret Intelligence. The real Diana Spencer lives on, seeing out her twilight…
Adam Lively: Writer - Literary Mentoring and Coaching 