voice | voice
May.12.2013
The Orchard Keeper, by Cormac McCarthy
You may become puzzled trying to categorize McCarthy’s writing style, but you won’t find it hard at all to place it in the canon of Southern literature. McCarthy eventually moved on from this subset, his most famous books taking place in the Southwest U.S.,...
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Apr.11.2013
This is a digression.
I was planning to go right to structure, but couldn't without discussing character first, and its musical equivalent.
The flute solo in my last post, Syrinx, illustrated not only parts, patterns, and structure, but also character. We can think of it as a monologue, written...
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Mar.18.2013
The Flat and Weightless Tang-Filled Future, by Lyn Fairchild Hawks
Many short story collections these days come in something of a random format, the stories a montage of writing experiments, tenses, and tones, as the writer tries to unfold and develop a voice. Not so with this one. Fairchild...
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Mar.01.2013
“We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.”
-Erica Jong
One of the greatest ironies is the writer who doesn't write. The person who reads books like one devouring cupcakes after a ten-day juice fast. The person, who is passionate about prose,...
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Feb.12.2013
It's a cold, listless day, weatherwise, taking its cue from lethargic sunshine. Meetings have been light on the work side. I'm working on next quarter's forecast for parts and unravelling what Europe needs to order to fill gaps. System outages are making it a frustrating...
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Jan.20.2013
It’s always baffled me when a student says as soon as he finds his voice he will feel like a real writer. It seems to me the real challenge is finding your voices. Set fiction aside for a moment. In your day to day encounters, it would be unusual, even odd, to speak in the same voice to everyone...
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Jan.12.2013
In case you haven't exposed yourself to the particular subset of U.S. authors who write so-called postmodern tomes (it's rather unique to the USA, I think), think David Foster Wallace. Jonathan Franzen. Jonathan Safran Foer. Thomas Pynchon. Michael Chabon. Don de Lillo. (A caveat: I'd like to...
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Dec.12.2012
Light work day after hours of fevered work. It was one of those mornings when I was thinking, the nights are just too short. I need more sleep. Others ambushed me as soon as I was online. Emails regarding various projects and problems awaited answers. I worked almost...
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Oct.23.2012
One curiosity has plagued me my entire life: I have no telephone voice.
My wife, like my Mom, and other females I know, have mastered the telephone voice. They can be angry and raging about something but pick up the telephone and they change their voice and personality,...
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Oct.10.2012
It takes long enough for a poet to find his true voice, and I guess I'm no exception. I feel like, after writing for most of my life, I'm almost there.
But (thanks to a prompt posted at We Write Poems) this week I took a step outside myself & written a masque/persona poem. I'm pretty happy with...
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