Categoría: How to write fiction
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Prosody
All poets use rhythm and all readers of poetry hear rhythm, whether or not they are conscious of doing so, but prosody, the description and analysis of poetic rhythms, can be as complicated as musical notation, and different languages require different sorts of prosody. In the classical languages prosody was quantitative, based on vowel length…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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.…