Inspiration/Musings – Page 102 – Further Annotations

On Narration:

Posted on July 18, 2014December 13, 2014 by blablablaandgabbler

And despite the profound and unsettling discoveries of modernism and post-modernism, and everything they show us about the unreliability of the narrator and the fallacy of omniscience, some of us still, when we read, are happy to accept that the narrative voice has the right to comment on a character, whether tartly or sympathetically, and the ability to go into that character’s mind and tell us what’s going on there. Do we ever stop to wonder how extraordinary it is that a disembodied voice can seem to tell us what is happening in someone’s mind?

From here/read the rest.

The direction of many of us will be more toward poetry than toward the traditional novel.

Posted on July 14, 2014December 31, 2018 by blablablaandgabbler

The Great novels we get in the future are not going to be those that the public thinks it wants, or those that critics demand. They are going to be the kind of novels that interest the novelist. And the novels that interest the novelist are those that have not already been written. They are those that put the greatest demands on him, that require him to operate at the maximum of his intelligence and his talents, and to be true to the particularities of his own vocation. The direction of many of us will be more toward poetry than toward the traditional novel.”

– Flannery O’Connor, The Grotesque in Southern Fiction. Bold face mine.

Novels ain’t nothin’ but a thang.

Dripping with Alchemy

Posted on July 14, 2014December 13, 2014 by blablablaandgabbler

We’ve quoted this before, but…

Posted on July 8, 2014December 13, 2014 by blablablaandgabbler

“It is significant that in Homer the smith of the gods is lame, and the poet among men is blind. That may be how the thing began. The defectives, who are no use as hunters or warriors, may be set aside to provide both necessaries and recreation for those who are.”

– C.S. Lewis, “Good Work and Good Works.”

Chekov, on why over half our novel takes place in an apartment:

Posted on July 6, 2014July 6, 2014 by blablablaandgabbler

In real life people don’t spend every minute shooting each other, hanging themselves and making confessions of love. They don’t spend all the time saying clever things. They’re more occupied with eating, drinking, flirting and talking stupidities – and these are the things which ought to be shown on the stage. A play should be written in which people arrive, go away, have dinner, talk about the weather and play cards. Life must be exactly as it is, and people as they are – not on stilts… Let everything on the stage be just as complicated, and at the same time just as simple, as it is in life. People eat their dinner, just eat their dinner, and all the time their happiness is being established or their lives are being broken up.

Granted, there is a shooting, hanging, and confession of love in THE AUTOMATION. But it’s not every minute.

BLA wanted me to point out that you can be just as stranded in an apartment as you can at sea. Hashtag, Odysseus.