Tag: epic poetry

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

Posted on 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.

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

Posted on 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.