Not just plants are regional: words, too. I moved all over the place when I was a kid, and I collected words and differences in pronunciation of words like most kids collected bubble gum trading cards. Milkshake, cabinet, frappe Even though these words reference the same thing, each brings a different feel to the image….
Readers need to connect the content to their own lives. Recently I was reading Jane Eyre. The narrator and main character Jane was describing a view of Rochester seated alone in a darkened room, and suddenly I was transported back about ten years and the memory of walking into my father’s office to see him…
I have been a fan of Heinlein’s for more than forty years. When he was alive, I watched constantly for his next publication, and I have read nearly everything he has written and a great deal of what has been written about his work. Learning only recently that there was an official biography about him…
Time links past with present Harper Lee had quite a task creating the narrative voice of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Sure Scout was a six-year-old girl who ages about two years in the course of the book; what’s the challenge? Seems easy enough — in that short span of years there is not…
John Steinbeck wrote for and about the guy next door, the man that works to pay the bills at the end of the month, for the poor cuss who hopes and hopes even when hope is lost, and loses and loses, even when he wins. Tortilla Flat He moved slowly and cautiously. Now and…
Door to the inside of a monster John Gardner’s Grendel is a work of delight and derangement cluttered in one diabolical monster’s mind. It is poetry garbed in prose, sophistry hiding behind a misunderstood, disadvantaged descendent of Cain. Gardner slips his monster into the reader, building sympathy and support as the beast twists its words…
Reading a Connie Willis novel is like drowning. Her very first paragraph is a rip tide that lets you get a breath just often enough not to drown you. You spend a lot of time treading water, but the liquid feels so lovely against your skin, a blood warm suspension, and you pray for breath…
The art of writing dialogue I have always enjoyed reading Heinlein’s books, but it is his dialogue that holds my attention the most. His characters play with words and by doing so demonstrate relationships and conditions. This excerpt from The Cat that Walks Through Walls is a great example of how his dialogue clearly separated…
