How to write fiction
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The ouroborus
As you can tell from a glance at the Contents, An Introduction to Literature includes practical advice about reading and responding to literature and writing analytical papers, advice that comes directly from our experience not only as readers and writers but also as teachers. This experience derives from classrooms, from conferences with students, and from assignments we have given, read, responded to, and graded. We have learned from our experiences and have done our best to give you the tools that will help you make yourself a more perceptive reader and a more careful, cogent writer. An Introduction to Literature. Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Second Printing. SYLVAN BARNET. Tufts University…
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The magic kingdom of Storytelling
As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled. Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language. Sapiens. Nuval Yoah Harari Someone will say: But God exists!And then, we might shut our traps to survive.Perhaps, only because the only time I discuss fiction is when…
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Tales about tales
Most likely, both the gossip theory and the there-is-a-lion-near-the-river theory are valid. Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. Sapiens. Nuval Yoah Harari
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Conviction, utility and stupidity
[…] the pre-eminent French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, considered ‘the weakness and stupidity of the sheep’ to be so extreme that ‘without the assistance of man, the sheep could never have sub-sisted, or continued its species in a wild state.’ Fortunately, it so happens that ‘this animal, so contemptible in itself, and so devoidof every mental quality, is, of all others, the most extensively useful to man.’ Here is another formula central to the human–ovine relationship: the sheer inanity of sheep justifies our use of them. Sheep. Philip Armstrong. Reaktion books. Can’t we just say it is useful and we are too lazy to go around hunting smarter…
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Inadequate ethnological data
The error of the nineteenth-century folklorists was not that they focused on similarities, but that their methods for alleging such similarities were not always sound. Much of what they did involved picking and choosing arbitrarily among inadequate ethnological data and inferring similarity where in many cases it did not exist.But with over a century of subsequent fieldwork to draw on, today both anthropologists and folklorists are in a better position to make cross-cultural comparisons than were the early folklorists. According to Dundes, studies in the distribution of myths reveal that while there is no myth that is truly universal, so is there no myth that has ever been found to…
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Superstitions
Nonverbal customs deriving from ancient fairy belief survive as well. Our forebears once nailed horseshoes above their doorways to keep them safe from fairies, a good-luck practice still widely observed. We encapsulate four-leaf clovers into keychain ornaments to carry as good-luck charms, but have forgotten that our ancestors used them to see through fairy deceptions. Fairy Lore. A Handbook. D. L Ashliman. Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Stories survive. The only thing they need to do so is change. Recycle as much as you can from unknown sources but please… Don’t make up Aztec Batmans [does the plural grammar rule apply when I’m speaking of a character being duplicated?]. Reality is stranger…
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Truth is the aim
What are the aims of the writers of literature? Well, one of our authors, Jamaica Kincaid in various interviews mentions her “insistence on truth,” even if—especially if—the truth is painful. It is not unusual for writers to insist that in their fictions they present truths, they tell it as it is, they wake us up, they seek to make us take off our rose-colored glasses, and to make us see and feel reality. Joseph Conrad, for example, said: “My task . . . is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” An Introduction to Literature.…
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Reference frame and motifs
In studying the distributions of motifs, one finds that the same object in different cultures may hold vastly different meanings. For example, snakes are found in the mythology and folktales of many cultures. While in Judeo-Christian tradition the snake usually symbolizes evil, in India it is a sacred creature that plays “a major role in folklore and in many Buddhist, Jaina, and Hindu legends. . . . In southern India, especially on the west coast, many houses have a snake shrine or a snake grove in a corner of the garden, where offerings, especially of milk, are made to the snakes” (Dallapiccola 2002, 139–140). In European folklore the dragon is…
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Is it worth to write short stories? How to write them? p3
HOW TO WRITE SHORT STORIES THEN? For en ending I’ll take a phrase attributed both to Mark Twain and Blaise Pascal: Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte[1]. I wrote long to you for I had no time to make it short. Summarizing: to make something as short as a question mark, Victor Hugo must have spent more than a few hours thinking. He also must have filled the waste bin. What do you prefer writing: long or short stories? Enjoy both. Pasto kalo. [1] It is attributed to Pascal in French… I shrug. I don’t know.
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Is it worth to write short stories? How to write them? p2
WHAT’S THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA’S TOPIC? Survival. We all like survival. We all are survivors of something. The displaced Russians from Tajikistan have fled their home to go and settle in Chernobil. They have gone from surviving war to surviving radiation. We, the rest of us with a lot less dramatic survival feats, survive sickness, nature… stupid bosses. In short, The old man and the sea is short, subtle and kicks ass. HOWEVER, THAT IS NOT AN ARGUMENT FOR SHORT The old man could be shorter. And according to literary analyze, Hemingway wanted to take us into a fight against adversity through dense[1] (in some critic’s opinion) prose.…
