That’s the voice of Demon Copperhead: titular character of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel. It’s a narrative voice that sticks like mud. Once you read it, you can’t shake it off. (Especially if you careen through all five-hundred-plus pages of Kingsolver’s book, like I did — unable to put it down.) Demon would be pleased with the …
‘In six seconds, you’ll hate me. But in six months, you’ll be a better writer.’ That’s how Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) starts his essay to new writers, because he’s about to fire a water cannon of bitter medicine down their gullets. If Palahniuk had his way, beginners wouldn’t be allowed to use Thought …
Sure. I’ve been out walking while clouds raced across the sky. But I didn’t recognise them as ‘greyhounds of heaven’. Nabakov did. Nabakov was a twentieth-century author. He worked in English, Russian and French, yet said: ‘I don’t think in any language. I think in images.’ His lavish descriptions seduced readers… and frustrated critics. Nabakov’s …
We follow a painter as she makes the last mark on her canvas. She glances about… draws a line… appraises the results… And the paragraph is pure Woolf: But what really excites me is the movement from observation to action to thought. Woolf captured the scene like she was pushing a movie camera. She let …
Open a book by Hemingway. Pick a paragraph at random. Most of the sentences will have fewer than ten words. Now, look at the words in those sentences. Do any stray over ten characters in length? Not likely. That would go against the Hemingway formula: short words in simple sentences. That’s how wannabes try to …
