May 26, 2015
by punjacked
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May 25, 2015
by Neelima
1 Comment
The first day of the month, a May Day, and Abhaya didn’t want to start. “I’ve always been the first name in the register, in my class, school and the entire state.”
So Jaya started with two interesting books.
River of Smoke is the second installment of the Ibis trilogy,”Ghosh’s research seems authentic and his descriptions are lovely to read. You can almost see Canton, the port where all the action happened.”
“However, it’s almost as if the author was forced into writing this book. While the first part had a definitive plot line and more delineated characters, this part fell short somewhere.I’m not excited about the last installment Flood of Fire.”
“Writing trilogies requires hubris,” Abhaya said, “Maybe that’s why I don’t write them.”
Since we were all ignorant of the backdrop to the Opium Wars in China, Jaya explained that goods in China were in great demand in the early nineteenth century.
“Jane Austen wanted a Chinese umbrella,I read somewhere,” said Abhaya.
It wasn’t just Jane Austen. There was an enormous demand for Chinese goods and the best trade-off seemed to be opium. There seem to be many parallels to the drug trade today.
It was the fictional aspect that didn’t work for Jaya. The multi-POV fell flat and the characters were almost sterile. “In the first part, the characters were sea bound to Mauritius. It was a time when the slave trade was being replaced by indentured labour, but in the second part there is no specific movement and I was confused about a character called Putli, later renamed as Puggli in Sea of Poppies to be nonchalantly called Puggli as though she had never been called Putli before.”
A lot lies in a name indeed. “Maybe it’s a SF opportunity for the third book-Puggli could have gone back in time and erased her name forever,” said Srishti. One tends to think like this while reading Terry Pratchett.
Another book that Jaya read is Wrong by David H.Freedman. She’s reviewed it at Worth a Read here. It’s a book that teaches you to be more alert and less gullible to expert chatter.
She then delved into a serious book. Anatomy of a Disappearance by Libyan writer, Hisham Matar. This sad story is about a boy called Nuri whose father has disappeared. Matar speaks of his country as just that—his country, without naming it. His first book was listed for the Booker Prize and he carries over the same atmosphere and longing to know the truth of what happened to his father into his second book.
“Somehow assassination seems to be better than disappearance,” Abhaya said. He had read this book as well.
I can’t help bringing in Patrick Modiano’s book The Search Warrant at this point. It is an interruption to the usual order of things, but since it is about an author’s brutally honest account of his search for a missing girl, it seems fair to add it here.
Many children went missing during the war years in Europe. Dora Bruder is one such. The author is obsessed with this young girl- he has seen her photograph and he knows her name. Little by little, he pieces together the story of her mediocre family who lived in and out of hotels. He is not sentimental at all; this adds to the trauma of the experience of having disappeared. Extermination was systematic. Files were filled and people were indexed as though they were folders in a computer. A single folder deleted means nothing in this universe of excess.
Modiano writes about the streets he walked through. He searches for Dora Bruder and brings France and its geography alive. When you search, it is all that matters.
More of the books we discussed in Part 2.
May 22, 2015 by InstaScribe | 1 Comment
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May 21, 2015
by Jandré
3 Comments
Women have been discriminated against since our ancestors dwelled in caves and chased hairy mammoths over cliffs. And it seems that this is a world-wide phenomenon, not unique to the East or the West, India, England, Nigeria or your neck of the woods.
The literary world has been no different and as a result some women have taken to donning breeches to hide their soft curves. At least with their pen names. Probably if Jane Austen had taken a leaf out of their books, she would have been better appreciated in her lifetime.
Wikipedia
Although Little Women was published under Alcott’s own name, she started out writing as A.M. Barnard. Mr. Barnard was a regular contributor to Atlantic Monthly. He became a very notorious figure.This publicity might have helped Louisa May to get published under her own name later on. Miss Alcott used her influence to promote woman’s suffrage and civil rights. She was one of the earlier fighters for gender equality.
“Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life,” Robert Southey, the then British poet laureate advised the Bronte sisters. Charlotte and her two sisters then made the decision to publish their poetry under the names Currer, Ellis and Act
on Bell. In 1846, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell saw the light.
Jane Eyre was also published by Currer Bell. Charlotte Bronte avoided the negative associations that plagued female authors. Today Jane Eyre is published under Bronte’s name, but it became a success under a man’s name.
Emily Bronte also published Wuthering Heights as her masculine alter ego, Ellis Bell. This secret was kept until after 1848 when Ellis was finally laid to rest. Emily’s name appeared on the cover for the first time in 1850, when Charlotte edited and published the book on her departed sister’s behalf.
Mary Ann Evans, aka George Eliot, purposely hid behind a male moniker to be taken seriously. Even though women were being published under their own names in the late 1800’s, they were thought of not being capable of producing much more than “lighthearted romances.”
It is true that she also wanted to avoid public scrutiny of her private live, which included an “interesting” relationship with a married man, but her main reasons were apparently literary.
George Eliot’s first published work was ironically titled Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, a book where the work being produced by women writers of the day was criticized. The question is whether Mary Ann Evans was being facetious or serious. What do you think?
Isak Denisen penned Out of Africa. It is thought that this twentieth century author, Karen Blixen, chose a male nom de plume more for her own privacy, rather than anything else. Since she was from a well-known Danish family, this is what she craved for.
Wikipedia
To Kill a Mockingbird is a well-known exploration of racism in the United States. This Pulitzer winner was written by a white woman Nell Harper Lee. A white woman writing a novel that exposes white on black racism in the USA of 1960 would face a lot of negative publicity. You can appreciate her motivation, if this indeed was why she chose to not be Nell.
Nora Roberts has already attained success in the romance genre, before changing into a man. J.D. Robb is well-known for his “In Death” series. This detective series, a genre which is dominated by men, interestingly enough, features a female protagonist, Eva Dallas.
It is unclear why Nora masqueraded as a man, but most probably she wanted this series to stand on its own and not lean on her previous works.
Wikipedia
I never knew this, but J.K. Rowling is a man’s name! The publishers worried that the Harry Potter series might not appeal to boys if they knew this was written by a “girl.” Joanne Rowling, desperate to be published, said that she did not mind what they called her as long as her books get published.
One would think that since the late twentieth century, at least, women should now be as publishable and reputable as their male counterparts. Just think of all the famous women authors of this era.
To name but a few, Jodi Picoult, Margaret Atwood, Stephenie Meyer, Danielle Steel, Patricia Cornwell, Hilary Mantel and many others, have reached success under their own personal feminine names.
Yet according to a 2010 survey carried out by Vida, an organization for women in Literary arts, women still get a raw deal. Generally books written by men are reviewed much more regularly than those written by women.
Referring to the above mentioned survey, it is safe to say that at least two-thirds of all reviewed books, in Britain and the US, have been written by men.
Even though there are still discrepancies between the way male and female authors are treated, we can see that there has also been quite a lot of progress. Has enough ground been covered? What do you think?
May 20, 2015
by InstaScribe
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May 19, 2015
by punjacked
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May 18, 2015
by Neelima
0 comments
Read Part 1 of the review of Writing Tools: 50 essential strategies for every writer, if you haven’t already.
Phrases like nut paragraph and broken line give you a tool that you may have used but weren’t conscious of. By naming the tools, Clark teaches the writer to be more aware of why some writing is better than others. By far, this is the only book that has so much clarity when it comes to specifying what an author can do right to improve her writing. Books like Bird by Bird and Writing Down the Bones give strength, but this book gives method.
In the second part of the book, he talks about the blueprints and habits we need to write effectively.
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An interesting tool is using your notebook like a camera. A journalist unconsciously uses the aerial view to express a kind of omniscient narrator stand. He comes close up to show you all the dirt and grime of the slums and the flies that crawl over the faces of starving children. When you write you have to keep moving your camera around, experiment with it and become one of those maniacal smartphone photographers who spend a lot of time observing the world through the lens.
Scenes have to be recreated and a good writer uses her power of observation to create reality from a mass of collaged circumstances. Sequence or the building up of ideas is an essential part of the craft of writing. Closure is important too. J.K. Rowling knew how her books would end.
Some good writing habits Clark advises us to have include writing about your writing process. This is something new- so if you have a story you have to deliver, write down how you are going to write it, who it is intended for and the kind of effect you need to create.
You need to compost ideas, save them in shoe boxes and folders.
As for completing projects, you need to break long projects into shorter ones. Reading the TOC helps.
Writing is a group activity. In this era of self-publishing, Clark’s advice to understand all facets of publication including editing and design is timely. He calls writing a dance. Workshops are good, editors are angels, and designers help the books sell. You need them all and the critics you love to hate are always better than that internal critic who stops you from creating the first draft sooner.
Although I’ve written at great length about these tools, I wouldn’t say there are too many spoilers. Clark uses some fantastic passages from great authors, uses concrete examples and gives meticulous homework, none of which I have given away in enough detail. Buy a copy of this book.
It will help you write better.
May 15, 2015
by InstaScribe
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May 14, 2015
by Neelima
2 Comments
Writing Tools: 50 essential strategies for every writer is a book that every writer should read, and every editor should swear by.
Roy Peter Clark dreams of creating A Nation of Writers, that nation being America. It works if you want to create a Globe of Writers too. He doesn’t believe that you need flair and magic and abracadrabra to write. He thinks you need fifty tools in your tool box (remember Stephen King’s Tool Box in On Writing?)
The fifty tools are displayed in a very matter fact kind of style in fifty chapters. Clark gathered these tools from the Poynter School for journalists, and many of his examples pertain to journalistic writing.
However, any kind of writing has the same essentials. One example I can give you is what the author mentioned about Gold Coins; every good story needs something to keep the reader going, the way a video games has many red herrings to get the player engrossed.
Clark thinks the writer’s struggle is over rated. It’s a craft you can learn. After all, you are never short of mentors and books.
In the first part of the book he talks about the nuts and bolts of writing and the special effects we need to make the writing sharp. He warns us that these are tools and not rules. We can’t get stuck on these rules but we can use them to tighten our stories.
So Tool 1 goes
Begin sentences with subjects and verbs.
Make meaning early, then let weaker
elements branch to the right.
Every chapter is filled with fantastic examples like the strong verbs that Ian Flemming uses in his famed From Russia with Love, 1957. A ‘passive’ Flemming would mean no James Bond movies at all.
You should use adverbs, but carefully, Clark reminds us. Killing me Softly is a good example of compelling adverb usage. J.K.Rowling uses quite a few adverbs – not a bad idea for a billionaire writer, so there goes. Rules can be broken.
One rule I liked was the –ing rule. After each chapter, he adds a Workshop. I was able to rewrite an impossible blog post and feel good about it after I followed the Workshop rules and dropped a whole bunch of unnecessary –ings.
English: Writing utencils: stencils Письменные принадлежности (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Workshop makes you mindful of the way you write and the way newspaper stories are written. You can also apply these nuts and bolts to your favorite books and understand what makes them tick.
Besides striking out adverbs, redundancies, needless prepositional phrases and ugly abstractions, you can add a bit of the odd special effect to enhance your writing. This must be the elusive style that Strunk and White talked about. Try describing little things around you—there are writers who do marvels by using what is familiar to create an effect. For instance, when it comes to names, who could forget Rip Van Winkle and Huckleberry Finn? So writing is in the observation, knowing the things around you and being interested in more than the usual.
Content is king, no doubt. Packaging is queen. Long sentences are heaven if you know how to write them as they were the armor of Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolfe and so many other writers who have made it to the pantheon of worthy penners of words; they are journeys. To simplify everything as is the norm nowadays is actually not a good idea. You can change the length of the paragraph as well. Sentences don’t need to look as though they are in uniform standing to attention. There could be some remarkably tiny paragraphs and some long rambling ones.
It’s all about knowing how to use these rules. More rules and tools in Part 2.
May 13, 2015
by InstaScribe
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By InstaScribe
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