Posts from the ‘Literature’ Category

  • Sacred Shadows Breathing With Latent Light

    February 12th, 2020 | Literature | journalpulp | No Comments

    He was going out by way of a narrow system attended by whispering voices that seemed to him sourceless, a static hiss growing louder, and angular shapes on the periphery of his vision which broke apart and rejoined in giant jigsaw pieces. These puzzle pieces snapped and clicked about him. Down this gun-barrel corridor that […]

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  • First, There Was The Scent Of Thyme

    February 9th, 2020 | Literature | journalpulp | No Comments

    First, there was the scent of thyme. It seeped through her body in the form of fevers — an invisible emanation, soft and swirling, like a gentle drift of water. The imperceptible scent of a thing, she thought, like an essence continually expelled — but by what or whom? And of what chemistry composed? What […]

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  • In Defense of Description

    July 25th, 2013 | Literature | journalpulp | 3 Comments

    There’s a common misconception — unfortunately growing — popular among so-called commercial-fiction coaches predominantly, though not exclusively, that stories and novels have one and only one real purpose: storytelling. Which is to say, plot. Which is to say, conflict. Anything, therefore, that slows the pace of the plot — or anything that disrupts the plot […]

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  • What Makes Literature Last?

    What Makes Literature Last?

    October 28th, 2011 | Literature | journalpulp | 2 Comments

    “One of the tests of a good writer,” said the poet Karl Shapiro, “is editorial acumen, the ability to turn down your work. It’s the amateur who falls in love with his own written words and holds them sacrosanct.” I think that that’s essentially true. I think also that anyone can learn to write formulaic […]

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  • Writers On Writers

    Writers On Writers

    August 14th, 2011 | Literature, Writers | journalpulp | 2 Comments

    “Rat-eyed” Virginia Woolf described Somerset Maugham as. “No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word,” said Eudora Welty of William Faulkner. “Curiously dull, furiously commonplace, and often meaningless,” Alfred Kazin said of William Faulkner. “Hemingway never climbed out on a limb and never used a word where the reader […]

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  • Writers Discussing Other Writers

    August 8th, 2011 | Literary trivia, Quotes | journalpulp | 2 Comments

    Charles Baudelaire spent two hours a day getting dressed. When Edgar Allen Poe married his cousin Virginia, he was twenty-seven, and she was thirteen. And consumptive. The genius poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins wanted to change his name to Pook Tunks. Robert Frost had only five poems accepted in his first seventeen years of writing and […]

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  • Characterization (Part 3)

    Characterization (Part 3)

    July 27th, 2011 | Characterization, Literature, Plot, Storytelling, Style, Theme | journalpulp | 3 Comments

    Characterization is a presentation of the personality of the people who populate a story. Characterization is primarily a depiction of motivation and motive. The reader must understand what makes the characters act in the way that those characters do. It’s been said that one of the truest tests of good literature is when you can […]

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  • Characterization (Part 1)

    Characterization (Part 1)

    July 22nd, 2011 | Characterization, Literature, Storytelling | journalpulp | 1 Comment

    If plot is the skeleton — that vital framework upon which the rest of the body is built — then characters are the soul. Characters are the reason we ultimately love or hate a story. “I’m sick to death of the inarticulate hero,” said John Fowles. “To hell with the inarticulate.” Characterization is in essence […]

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  • Why Are Stories Important?

    Why Are Stories Important?

    July 20th, 2011 | Art, Literature, Storytelling | journalpulp | 6 Comments

    Stories are important because human beings are conceptual. This among other things means that humans survive by use of their reasoning brains. Humans evolved neither the balls of bulls, nor the trunks of elephants, nor the claws of bears, nor the necks of giraffes, but the brains of Homo sapiens, with a capacity to think. […]

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  • Lice In The Locks Of Literature (And Other Curious Quotations)

    Lice In The Locks Of Literature (And Other Curious Quotations)

    July 16th, 2011 | Literature, Quotes | journalpulp | 2 Comments

    The fact is, I did not eat every day during that period of my life. Said the surrealist Andre Breton, explaining the possible provenance of some of his strange and early literature. They rowed her in across the rolling foam — The cruel, crawling foam — to her grave beside the sea. Wrote the English […]

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