Categoría: How to write fiction
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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.…
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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,…
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Is it worth to write short stories? How to write them? p1
WRTITING FEW WORDS I’ve come across writing fiction manuals where the author boasts about writing 50,000 words in one go. So effortlessly they end up erasing scenes. Is it bad to write a lot less than that?! When you think imposition (the way the paper is folded in order to get 4-8-12 pages), maybe. Since…
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I find it familiar
The presumption that sheep are unintelligent can be found as far back as Aristotle, who asserted in about 350 bce that the sheep is said to be naturally dull and stupid. Of all quadrupeds it is the most foolish: it will saunter away to lonely places with no object in view; oftentimes in stormy weather…
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Tales about hatred
There were many men working at Hazard’s who remained anti-Negro, and violently so. Freed blacks would threaten such men by competing for their jobs. George wished that kind of hatred didn’t exist at the ironworks, but he also knew no government could legislate it out of existence because it was rooted in fear; illogical. North…
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Exophony 3
In Exophony 1 and 2, I blabbed about what exophony is and reviewed a short list of writers who found themselves in a different language. Which means I’m not all lost writing in this terrible language. Today I’ll only quote a bit of Chantal Wright’s essay «Exophony and literary translation. What it means for the…