mmoa_writes

You know what would make a truly 'divergent' history of the Americas?

An America that no Europeans managed to find.

( Read more... )

You know that speculating thing? You fail at it.

Link for the day:
Cry for the Forgotten Continent

Sometimes I wish I studied the arts for a degree, because there are all sorts of things you don't realise until someone points them out to you.

For instance, in the latest Newsnight Review, during an interview with Colm Toibin about his new book, he mentioned how he wanted to write the novel in a linear, pared down style similar to Jane Austen's - no flashbacks, very few descriptions of people's expressions etc.

In the case of facial descriptions, one result is that it becomes clear to the reader that people may not be saying precisely what they mean, that they may be concealing their personal thoughts and opinions as they outwardly proclaim another.

Now obviously there are many techniques that arrive at the same effect, but I found this very interesting because of it's simplicity (and also because I hadn't noticed this before, even though I'd read most of Austen's output and paid - by my reckoning - a lot of attention to them). This was so interesting that I began to think how I could implement this technique when writing from certain characters povs.( Read more... )

So post-exam season is going to be a lot of fun, I can tell!