Although my reading time has been limited since I've been working a full-time consulting job, I have managed to complete several excellent books. Here's my list since April. Rabbit Remembered by John Updike A novella that Updike wrote in 2000, several years after he finished the Rabbit quartet. It's about the interjection of Annabelle, the illegitimate daughter to the now deceased Harry Angstrom, into the life of his middle-aged son Nelson, now separated from his wife Pru. Other key characters from the Rabbit series appear: Janice, Harry's widow, who has married Harry's old nemesis Ronnie Harrison; Judy, Harry's granddaughter, now nineteen, who plans to become an air hostess; and his fourteen-year-old grandson Roy, with whom Nelson communicates via email. It certainly was very satisfying to read how these characters turned out and to learn Rabbit did indeed father a daughter, which he suspected all along. This was a page-turner for me as were the four other Rabbit books. Man's … [Read more...]
Writing work check-up
On January 5, 2015, I wrote a short writing to-do list for the coming few months. Today, since it's almost the end of January, is a good time to take stock. I'm pleased to report that I'm moving right along on my novel revisions. I've incorporated my red lines and yellow highlights into my online Revision 4 chapter files up to page 124. That means I have only 54 single-spaced hard-copy pages to go. Of course that doesn't mean that I'm finished finished. As I've revised I've tagged many many pages that I need to go back to. Like yesterday for instance. I was working on Chapter Seventeen which required that I add a new subsection at the chapter's end. I wrote it. I stepped back from it, I thought about how John Updike writes incredibly detailed descriptions, and I realized I wrote only the bare bones so far. I need to go back to that little subsection and add and add and add more. Remember the old adage - show don't tell? Well my bare bones only tell. I haven't written the … [Read more...]
Revisiting John Updike
It's a given that reading is just as important as writing or maybe even more so. I'm always reading something. In the last month I read the first two novels that John Updike wrote about Rabbit Angstrom (Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux). My intent is to read some well-known and well-regarded books written by people of my generation. Philip Roth is on my list as well. I have no doubt I can learn a thing or two about novel-writing from these books. I won't get into a discussion of plot and characters here. I am more interested in Updike's writing style. The books are long. I bought old paperback editions and the typeface is so tiny I could barely get through five to ten pages at a sitting. Recently new novelists have been told to vary the length of their chapters and sentences and paragraphs and use a lot a dialogue instead of long narratives. Updike consistently breaks those rules. The two books I read had long, long chapters, paragraphs and sentences and little dialogue. … [Read more...]
More writing quotes
I've said before that I collect quotes, and I've posted writing quotes on Choices many times. Well, I just came across a list of seventy-two more that I have saved in my Documents Folder for the last couple of years. I'll share some with you now and more later in the year. I don't want to bore you if you're not into this as much as I am. By the way, some of these authors are unknown to me. I think it might be a good idea to get to know about them, so I've marked those with an asterisk (*). I'd love to know what you know about them. The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress. Philip Roth The road to hell is paved with adverbs. Stephen King Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. ¦ It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a … [Read more...]
