Results of Ruminations

Virginia Woolf: The essay, then, owes its popularity to the fact that its proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities, so that under the decent veil of print one can indulge one’s egoism to the full. You need know nothing of music, art, or literature to have a certain interest in their productions, and the great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast into the form of essays. (" The Decay of Essay Writing ") For the most part, I like Virginia Woolf. I studied her works a couple of different times in college, and though she's hardly a "beach read" type of author, she's thoughtful and significant. Nevertheless, the aforementioned essay smacks of "old man shouts at clouds"--you know, this old thing.* Perennial. ( Source )  Despite her crotchety take on "kids these days" and their "writings about themselves", Woolf has so...

I'm teaching a new Shakespeare class this year. I've yet to really teach the same one: When I first began, it was a co-taught class with a BYU professor who was only there every other day. Yet I learned a lot about teaching writing and showing students how to improve via revisions (so totally my strong point, don't you know) and hard work on their writing. The next two years I worked with another teacher, but he was in class even less frequently than the BYU professor. Each time was a refining of what had come before, and there was always a shift in the texts. (With Shakespeare, there's a massive crop to explore, which is exciting and a little intimidating.) Last year, Shakespeare was also fine arts: Shax on the stage and the page was our idea, with different terms focusing on one part or the other of the Bard's oeuvre. I learned a lot about the actor (and acting), which was fun for me, if a little stressful. I haven't taught a drama class before, and I don...

Over the last six or seven years, I've been trying to refine what my voice sounds like as a writer. Of course, there's the discrepancy between the fact that written language and spoken  language are rather different fundamentally. It's one of the weird things about writing: Whoever it was who did it first chose, for whatever reason, to name this phenomenon as "voice". It's not aural, but visual. It resides in its own part of the brain where characters live. I've often said that writers are strange folk because they scriven what the voices in their heads say, then demand that someone else pay money to go through that same imagination. Basically, we pay to hear the voices in another's head. I think that's where the voice concept comes in. The cadences and tones are imagined, and the best readers are the ones who differentiate between those separate voices naturally. Writers who sell well, broadly speaking, are those who can communicate that unique ...

There are two basic philosophies about how you write a novel: Gardeners or architects--also known as pansters and outliners. The idea of "pantsing" is that you're writing by the seat of your pants. You don't have a lot of stuff written down. You feel a story is in there somewhere, and that you need to write about it. Here's how Stephen King phrases it in his memoir/writing advice book (page 163-164): I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground...Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it's enormous, a Tyrannosaurus rex  with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same. Technically, he's discussing the gene...