The reason for doing this is not only to grasp the bare bones of our language but to figure out how to deliver those bare bones in various configurations. Various configurations will keep your writing from becoming boring. They will make sure that the word or phrase you are writing is going to land in the right place. They will also allow a degree of beauty and/or mystery to enter your work. The poetic terms assonance, consonance, and alliteration are not confined to poetry; they come in handily in prose as well.
Most art has a public face—music is played, paintings are displayed, plays are enacted, movies are filmed and often watched by groups. Books tend to be more private, from one person’s act of writing to another’s act of reading. Most mysterious of all is the hidden middle stage, the offstage act of editing. Yet sometimes it can make all the difference.
“What do you like to read?” It’s a perfectly reasonable question, but it always makes me flinch. I am a reader — that is my identity before anything else, including writer, partner, or mother — but I have no idea how to answer that question.
Through multiple definitions of the word “safe” – physical, emotional, psychological, financial – Gattis has created a gripping novel about opportunity, transformation and hope.
I longed for the fearlessness of “My Struggle,” its unwillingness to tame “the ugly and unpleasant,” its oceanic sense of life’s dangers and unpredictability. But in “Autumn,” Knausgaard keeps us on the shore. The shells he gives us to admire are intricate, absorbing and beautiful; this book is full of wonders. But it isn’t, just yet, the whole story.
Dear Monica—that’s how you start a letter, with a salutation, I’d almost forgot.
Monica, my dear, my love, my girl woman pony heart—I’ve written you a letter! On paper! With pen! A letter!!!
(How many exclamation points do I have to use nowadays to come off as normal???)