storytelling

thanks to the ever vigilant and radiant Robyn Bender for a link to the British Library, where they are always thinking up interesting ways to use the internet to bring their incredible holdings right to your computer screen. You'll do better with it if you have a fairly fast internet connection.

Also from Robyn, somebody who really knows how to top a wedding cake. When we got married, lo those many years ago, I was so anxious about the terrible cake toppers available to us that I finally decided not to have one at all. Instead I scandalized both cake decorator and florist in that small English town by providing drawings of the floral arrangements I wanted to put on the cake. That kind of thing hadn't made it to England in 1988, and they resisted. But I did get my way, in the end.

Still, I would have preferred something like this couple, courtesy of the guy who does the amazing pumpkins.

Posted by at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Generally my take on writer's block is simple. If you're stuck, you're trying to force the story in the wrong direction. This time it took me three days to figure that out, three days of inching forward against huge resistance from the characters and the story itself. Trying to figure out what was wrong, how I could fix it, how such a great scene could fall so flat.

Three in the morning, I woke up and realized that I was committing the great sin, the pushing-the-story-where-it-doesn't-want-to-go sin. Just as soon as that thought came to me, the floodgates opened and now I know what to do. Starting with deleting the scene which I like, but doesn't work right here, right now. Sometimes you have to do that, and it's hard. Generally I take such bits and pieces and stick them in a file called bitsnpieces, which I check once in a while to see if there's anything I can use.

In this particular case I'm going to have to do some drastic POV finagling, but I think it will work.

On a different matter entirely, this sentence from The Wall Street Journal:

And the perpetrator probably may not be a stranger.

Does this strike you as odd? probably may not strikes me as so odd that it took me a moment to parse it. I would expect to read probably is not OR may be, but not this unholy union of modal verb with adverb, that doesn't work for me -- and by that I mean, it doesn't strike me as something a native speaker of English would say or use. Is this a new construction that's making the rounds? If you've seen it in other places, please provide examples.

more soon.

Posted by at 9:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)