The anonymous wallflower,
Awaits.
A victim unaware.
Unsuspected,
They approach and latch,
Using polite smile.
Their envy not on sight.
How to suck you dry?
Thinks our vampire.
Categoría: Uncategorized
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Coveting the envy
Photo by César Emilio Ángeles on Pexels.com -
Las popopo
Photo by Klaus Nielsen on Pexels.com Plumas.
Un revoltijo de plumas.
Una gota redonda, roja.
Ningún ruido.
Eso fue todo.
Y la congoja.
El grito del halcón al otro día.
Y uno sentado,
Recordando. -
Cuentos sobre la culpa
Photo by Emily Rose on Pexels.com Él ha visto hermosas acusaciones, en las que no había una palabra que sobrase. Ésta no era una: las frases se empujaban y chocaban entre sí, y se aguijoneaban y se derramaban, feas en el contenido y feas en la forma. El plan contra Ana no está santificado en su gestación, es intempestivo en su presentación, una masa de tejido nacida sin forma; esperaba una lengua que lo moldease como moldea a los oseznos la lengua de su madre que los lame. Tú lo alimentaste, pero no sabías lo que alimentabas: ¿quién habría pensado que Mark confesaría, o que Ana actuaría en todos los aspectos como una mujer oprimida y culpable, con el peso del pecado sobre ella? Es como los hombres dijeron hoy en el juicio: somos culpables de toda clase de acusaciones, hemos pecado todos, estamos todos carcomidos y podridos de delitos e, incluso a la luz de la Iglesia y del Evangelio, no debemos saber siquiera cuáles son.
Thomas Cromwell. Una reina en el estrado. Hilary Mantel. -
El escritor no vive en tierra fantasía
Photo by Alexander Mass on Pexels.com Porque también es bueno salir al mundo real. La gente nos acusa de vivir en mundos de fantasía. No lo comprenden. No es que perdamos la pista al mundo real. No es que tengamos una especie de esquizofrenia que nos impida distinguir entre las alucinaciones y la realidad. Lo nuestro no es eso. La gente no deja de decirlo, y me molesta porque no es cierto. Estoy construyendo algo, creando algo. Es una tarea muy absorbente, y también muy gratificante. Pero no por ello olvido el mundo en el que vivo, aunque, si alguien me interrumpe, ponga cara de enfadado porque en realidad me molesta un poco que me saquen de la conexión genial que estaba haciendo entre dos partes distintas de mi historia.
Brandon Sanderson. Curso de escritura creativa. Sinequanon. -
A web of words
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com Words are the prelude, the story is nothing else than the marvelous use of words as tools performed in scene after many practice hours. Thats what a quote of myself would say. However, Im not quotable.
Thus, its time to share a Reith lecture. One from 1996. That old!
Yes, that old. In the original entry, the one I translated 1, I mention the RAE discussion on the j and the x and you might get confused what does the RAE has to do with a web of words. You might even ignore what the RAE is!
THE RAE
RAE stands for Royal Academy of (E for the Spanish) Language. Theres no such institution in English. English thrives by adding words from the colonial territories (either conquered by the British empire or by the Coca cola one). All you have is the Oxford dictionary as the dictator of GOOD ENGLISH USAGE.
Well, we, in the Spanish speaking world, we have the RAE. And people (the common people) can get really angry about the RAE discussing if the ancient usage of the x and the j is proper.
To be true, the RAE is quite reasonable (except when admitting women into their ranks) and it has admitted popular usages of the words instead of fostering the idea of the language being unchangeable2.
You will see why I say this by listening to the lecture. All I’m doing today is posting the link. The questions posed there are equally valid in Spanish as they’re made in English. Its worth thinking about it when writing fiction.
Anyways, this is a blog where nonsense is allowed.
This is a podcast broadcasted by the BBC Reith lectures in 1996 as a series of lectures by Jean Aitchinson.
- With a lot of trouble and in floppy time due to the fact Im a terrible listener; I need the transcriptions. Otherwise I keep listening Tim Ferrough where Dean Farrar should be. ↩︎
- Its my opnion that the flexibility of the Academy makes it possible to understand Cervantes 500 years later. Unlike Shakespeare, whom I cant read in English at all.
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How to turn causal into casual in fiction?
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com Aha, so that’s how you turn causal into casual!
EUREKA (you might skip this)
The Eureka moment happened watching Luna Papa; 1999 movie directed by Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov, as a Russian, Tajikistan, Germany, Austria and France's collaboration. By the way, I was eating one of the few dishes I was able to cook then (without spoiling tomato broth or rice): diced tomatoes with boiled potatoes and canned tuna sprinkled with thyme over toasted tortillas (no, you for sure haven't even seen them).
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE MOVIE (you might prefer start reading here)
Mamlakat, a pregnant main character, meets a physician's trio buying blood... Illegally of course. Alikque, maybe not even a real physician, flirts with her among a police chase after them in the fake ambulance! Her father crashes his motor against the police patrol to get rid of them and save Mamlakat from going to jail.And that's it about this guy flirting with her. Until they meet again in a train, the fake physician about to be shot for cheating at poker. However, that comes later. For the moment, the storytelling distracts us by showing how much the inhabitants of Far Khor are outraged by the girl being visibly about to become a SINGLE mother. Which causes Mamlakat to run again from home... By train.Thus, she saves our guy from being shot, by saying he is the father of the big belly so he can't be killed because of gambling debts.
THE MILK IN THE FRIDGE RIGHT UNDER YOUR NOSE
Yes, I know. This is basic! Yet, sometimes, we have the milk under our nose in the fridge and we can't see it. We're too close or not in the right angle. Writing manuals can explain it with a surplus of examples and indeed, we fail to see it.
To turn causal into casual is like having a mouse at home. You haven't seen the damn rodent at all but you know it is there. How? Mice leave behind little round thingies— if you might not tolerate the word. They also leave nibbled cables/fabric/plastic, scraps of food and fiber balls behind them. Even the rain proof coat is susceptible to be eaten, besides the glue trap. There won't be the big smelly mud cake of cows…
None of the causal “facts” of our tale will be holding an "Acme bomb" tag. You won't see the mouse. You will see what's left behind.
And here I'm not sure if it is one of two ideas. Is it a bad story or a teenager story the one with a capybara jumping over you? I mean if after reading that Delilah Dreyfus, famous assassin, thinks: "It is impossible that they are in contact with the princess"; you can't deduce yourself, on your own, she is the princess and need more visible clues... Does that mean that you just lack experience or are you a person requiring books for dummies1—to tell the truth, once I tried one (grammar for dummies), it was so obscure and difficult to understand I gave up reading...
The mouse is there, we only need to be perceptive for good authors will leave behind cheese crumbs hidden among Quidditch games, pre marriage existential crisis, naked witches dancing. Anything that is unimportant, will happen and may never change the plot's going on. Anything to distract from the pure fact about to shatter casualty. Anything to hide the way dots connect has to be concealed by distraction.
In plainly good stories, the mouse can be seen but it is STILL a mouse and it will leave behind traces to look up for. Capybaras make stories too predictable. And even kids need a certain degree of thinking.
I hope you find this useful to think where to keep a mouse in your story. And if you ever decide to kill it, just do it a pain free way. Pasto kalo.- Intolerant question ahead; thinking requires fat burning and not many people likes burning fat (which is fine
too) but is that why soap operas are so popular? ↩︎
- Intolerant question ahead; thinking requires fat burning and not many people likes burning fat (which is fine
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About dialogue: She said, he said. p2
Photo by S Rawos on Pexels.com Let’s continue babbling about how to use dialogue and the things I don’t understand.
DESCRIBE WHAT THE CHARACTERS DO AS THEY TALK
This technique is used to keep interest and to add subtext and tone.It isn’t the same to say:
Mariana, very angry, said he was an @__35-;!To to say:
Mariana said he was an #44_67 whilst trying to scratch his face.Mostly, bad words are enough to show how much of a bother the guy is. Unless we use this:
Mariana said he was an #4#4, holding the front flaps of his jacket and licking his lips.That turns everything into an erotic game. It all belongs to the rule: show, don’t tell in the technical side of things; plus, avoiding the adverbs.
USE TAGS
A common place in manga and webtoon are ‘lost’ dialogue balloons associated to no one. They’re upsetting and make reading difficult. So, to avoid your reader getting lost, make dialogue as clean as possible. Andrea Camilleri won’t as much as use identification tags to name the person speaking but, in exchange, he would write dialogues of only two speakers alternatively speaking.Unlike what happens in a meeting room filled with people. Here, we need the tags and those have to be as invisible as spider cobs are to flies. Reason why not to say: ‘her voice fell like a leaf on the woods’ and that’s the second convention I’ve broken. And I remind you, I never been published and I just write nonsense.
TO BE CONTINUED
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Le nouvelle descriptif pour les écrivains
Photo by Iurii Laimin on Pexels.com Si vous dites aux grandes personnes : « J’ai vu une belle maison en briques roses, avec des géraniums aux fenêtres et des colombes sur le toit…» elles ne parviennent pas à s’imaginer cette maison. Il faut leur dire : « J’ai vu une maison de cent mille francs. » Alors elles s’écrient : « Comme c’est joli ! »
Le petit prince, chapître IV. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
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De la individualidad
Photo by Teddy tavan on Pexels.com Por otra parte, la psicología, en sus poemas, es muy rudimentaria; los héroes de quienes hablan tienen algo de simplistas y se hallan casi siempre desprovistos de individualidad. Las intrigas y las peripecias están narradas en un estilo convencional y estereotipado.
La historia empieza en Sumer. Samuel Noah Kramer
