A World of Speculation An Orthodox Christian looks at literature and life Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 1 0 46 1760

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Thought for the day 2007-10-31 07:56:00 Writing a novel is like climbing stairs carrying a huge armload of laundry -- socks, underwear, sheets and towels, clothes for children and adults -- all the while wearing (among other things) high heels and tiara.Powered by ScribeFire. ...

What's Going On?: The game 2007-09-22 12:16:00 A black man and a black woman stand on a street corner in inner but not Downtown Portland. She is talking with animated, but not wild gestures. (This is where her racial background is relevant; blacks tend to use bigger gestures than people of, for example, northern European descent.)I had the length of the stoplight to ask, Is she angry? At the man she's talking to? What's their relationship? What's his reaction?By the time I got my last glimpse, I had concluded that she was talking about something that angered her at the time, but now was an entertaining story. She had a residue of anger, but it was not directed at the man she was talking to. She knew the man, but he was a neighbor, a co-worker whom she had happened to run into, not a husband, brother, anything close like that. The man was enjoying the story.But because I had been reading How to Read a Person Like a Book, I could take a little extra time and ask what I was basing the conclusions on.First, the relationship. They st ...

I'm reading a book 2007-09-20 13:25:00 More thoughts on my most recent post about entering fictional worlds.When I -- and probably a lot of people -- am reading a book and not in the story's world, I'm evaluating. It might be grammar, story structure, character, whether the "facts" of the story are believable, whatever. The critical sense is antithetical to the dream state. And when new writers show somebody their story, they sometimes get critiqued on a lot of things that wouldn't be noticed if the reader had been in the story world. And it's not so much that the noted critiques are wrong, but if the new writer were to fix all these little critiques without addressing the world problem, then the next read will bring more of the same level of critiques, often telling the writer to change back the things he just fixed. If the story works, the critiquer wakes from the dream after some block of pages and says, "Oh, that's right. I'm supposed to be critiquing this."But one reader's dream state is another's crock of mush ...

On beginning a novel 2007-09-18 23:18:00 I've been thinking a lot lately about stories about crossing over into other worlds. It's a staple of the fantasy genre -- if the character is not born in this alternative universe, he has to get there somehow, whether it's by falling down a rabbit hole, stepping through a magical post in the train station, finding an opening in the back of a wardrobe or an invisible door into the London Underground. In fact, there are too many such stories to mention, and I'd like to try to understand what they mean.But I think one thing that is true about these doors into elsewhere is that they're a metaphor for the story itself. What every storyteller does, when we do our task, is draw the reader/viewer/listener into this other world -- whether past or future, a locale exotic or mundane, set among the glittering wealthy or the seamy underside. The story reader is in a sort of dream state. He doesn't see what's around him but instead sees Hogwarts or Middle Earth or a space odyssey or Edwardia ...

Naming names 2007-09-17 18:52:00 Populating a novel can be hard. After the top tier of characters have introduced themselves and then their closest associates, you're left with "guy who sells papers" and "driver." Which can be OK if that's all they do, but if they come back, if the POV character knows their names (or maybe even if not), the author needs to know their names.Here's a site for suffering storytellers: Behind the Name: the etymology and history of first names. Don't let that subtitle fool you though. These given names from many cultures and traditions can work perfectly well as family names if need be. And don't miss the random name generator for quick results. Pick a sex, and one, two or a handful of sources (such as Roman mythology and Esperanto), and presto! Meet the guy who delivers pizza -- Quirino Vittore. You can use him in your story. I don't have any pizza guys in my current one.Powered by ScribeFire. ...

A garden of music 2007-08-16 19:50:00 One of my favorite places in the world is the Portland Chinese Garden. It's a block surrounded by some of the busiest streets in Portland. On one side is an office building; on another a single-room-occupancy hotel; just a couple of blocks away are the downtown post office and the train station. And in this garden is a paradise -- a place of calm quiet, still water, an ever-changing landscape of growing, blooming, dying, and rebirthing plants, with a tea house where hours can pass without my ever noticing them.On a day last week, we heard jazz pianist Randy Porter play there. There were maybe a hundred or more people sitting in chairs around the garden and the music drifted out across the water, where the locuses bloomed huge and pink on tall stems. The garden seemed small for the first time, with the office building across the street forming a backdrop to the "Flowers Bathing in Spring Rain" pavillion (fortunately, August in Portland is not a time of spring rain). My husband and I re ...

A speculation on Transfiguration (reprise) 2007-08-05 15:39:00 In honor of tomorrow's Feast, I've dug out a 2005 speculation on the Transfiguration. It starts with a metaphor and ends with "What if" and meanders through time, literature, heaven and earth, and the Communion of the Saints to arrive at the meeting of Christ, Moses and Elijah on Mount Tabor. It's quite long, and if it's not comprehensible, I'll give you your money back. Here goes.The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man reading a book.Time in the book marches according to its own inexorable rhythm, and the reader may experience it sequentially, page by page, in his imagination coming to the events one by one as the characters do. But when he closes the book, all of the book time is contained between the two covers. The reader exists on the same plane as the Author of the book, but the reader is not the author, and the author knows the book and the characters and the backstory and the motivations in ways that the reader can only begin to appreciate.Within the book, the characters exper ...

When genres collide 2007-08-03 17:13:00 I know it's been done from science fiction to western (as in the television series Firefly and Molly Gloss's The Dazzle of Day). But Steve Ely's introduction to "Cloud Dragon Skies" talked about how often science fiction is about meeting the unknown, which is also the focus of all stories of exploration, colonization and making a life far from the home civilization, which also describes westerns.Given that backdrop, when I listened to this 1955 podcast of an episode from the western, Fort Laramie, from Vintage Radio, I thought, just for fun, I would pretend I was listening to science fiction. For a long time, I've liked science fiction and not much liked westerns. Now, I think maybe there's no difference. Past, future, this world, that planet, Native Americans, Native Martians, colonists living in fear and danger from the others and from their own people, good and bad guys on both sides. Try it on the next western you see -- whether this one or some other. I'd be interested in y ...

Literary agent gives free e-book on the dreaded query 2007-07-30 22:14:00 Literary agent and author Noah Lukeman has posted a 100-page e-book (PDF format) titled How to Write a Great Query Letter.He's one of the top agents in the business, and free advice from someone of his caliber is very welcome.Powered by ScribeFire. ...

Which font should I use? 2007-07-09 07:46:00 The last writer to arrive at the workshop, a 50-something medical professional, is an attractive woman with large earnest eyes. Under her arm, she carries an 800-page manuscript (I'm estimating a 250,000 to 300,000 word count) that she's planning to pitch at an upcoming writers' conference.At the end of the Q&A period at the end of the workshop, the woman asks a question about her manuscript: "Does this font work for the Chinese?"Huh?As it turns out, in her sprawling landscape of a novel, her characters speak French, German, Italian, Hebrew, and Chinese. Oh, and English. And the way she's chosen to reveal this in her manuscript is to have a different font for each language. And it's not a Chinese scene and then a Hebrew scene; it's a quote of Chinese, in the Chinese font, followed by "he said" (or whatever) in the English font.I've been told by publishing professionals that a first-time novelist is going to have a hard time selling a manuscript over 100,000 words. And I've run ...

Compossible 2007-06-28 18:55:00 Anu Garg's word of the day today "compossible" exactly describes a new serendipity in my novel.To give a brief update, a while back, I had a chance to attend a Michael Hauge workshop in Portland. Michael is a Hollywood screenplay consultant whose clear and usable explanations of story structure make his workshop one of the best I've ever attended. And his application of story structure to the character arc -- the distinction between a character's identity and essence -- works for real people, as well as fictional characters. When I told my friend Barbara about it, she compared his approach to Thomas Merton's view of the true and and the false self. She half-jokingly suggested that we invite Michael Hauge to give a talk at our church. Michael would be -- surprised -- I think, at such an invitation, but since then, I've been noticing how that comes up in Church literature. That would be a long blog post in itself, and it's not what I wanted to talk about today.A few weeks later, La ...

Lines from a deposition 2007-06-03 22:55:00 I just love this stuff. I'm proofreading a deposition in which the attorney is asking the plaintiff in an automobile accident case about what happened immediately after the accident:Q. And did you say anything to your wife?A. I asked her how she was doing. We were obviously a little shook up and sore. But, you know, she was really concerned about her little dog we had just got.Q. How was the little dog?A. I think it's okay. Didn't say anything to us.Q. Does your dog have the ability to speak?A. It does not, no.For more, go to the Say What? blog.Powered by ScribeFire. ...

Which way is up? 2007-05-04 16:50:00 The artist and her friends were placing artworks in the Starbucks gallery (hung on the coffee shop walls for sale).They were bold, colorful oil paintings with bright yellows, oranges, purples. One of the women mentioned how much she liked the "fish" painting, but if there was a representation of a fish, I didn't see it.As I sat there trying to plan chapter 4 of my book, they wandered around the shop, looking for the right place to put the paintings.One of the friends took a 2 x 2 1/2 canvas that may have been of a bouquet of irises and tulips -- or not -- and hung it in a vertical orientation between two windows. "That looks really good," she said, and several others agreed.The artist stood back apiece. "Well, it's sideways," she said, and seeing me watching, she gave a friendly nod and shrug. "I guess it doesn't matter which way the dedication hangs."And while I admired her flexibility, it was a different way of looking at art from what I would have expected. I would have thought t ...

Just forget the giant beach umbrella 2007-04-30 22:41:00 I don't have the time or skill to photoshop this, so you'll just have to use the imagination God gave you: Our lovely blue planet, wearing fashion shades and a pink bikini, enjoys the cosmic beach under a giant space-based beach umbrella.A little further out, Mars, wearing a muscle shirt but still sunburned bright red, wiggles around in his orbit to try to stay in the shade of earth's umbrella.In the meantime Pluto and his new friends are chasing sticks into the primal deeps.Just another fun day in the Milky Way.But forget it. The bean counters at the UN actually found a program that they thought would be too expensive for the value to be gained from it. Fancy that. Maybe Al Gore would be willing to pay for it.H/T: Fr. Joseph.Powered by ScribeFire. ...

Quiet time at Orthodox Writers Week 2007-04-27 16:14:00 We have been very, very good today. We sit in our little worlds, arrayed on couches, benches, on the beach, with our laptops, manuscripts, notebooks in hand.Quiet, please. We are birthing. Articles, books, poetry, a more conscious life. Gloria in her headphones is encased in a sphere of music. I don't hear it. Katherine turns the pages of a loose-leaf binder. Earlier this morning, she was organizing; now her fingers dance across the keys. Behind me, Andrew sits with a laptop at the big wooden dining table. He is pensive, conversing with the muse. After a long walk at the beach, Barb emerges with notebooks and clean socks.And I -- I have stopped 600 words into my goal of 1,000 at this sitting to tell you, O Excellent Reader, what you're missing.Outside, the sun shines, and the ravens and blackbirds laugh and sing, and the ocean whispers its secrets to the sand on the beach.But we are very, very quiet.Powered by ScribeFire. ...