by Joe Bunting |
Personally, I enjoy beautiful writing. A few years ago, I was reading Faulkner on a bus. Liz read one page and said, “Yuck. So confusing. Do you even understand that?”
“Sometimes. He writes so beautifully, though,” I said.
There’s something about beautiful writing that makes us want to read it. Perhaps Faulkner’s not your favorite, but have you ever read something where you just said, “Wow,” and immediately knew you were reading a true master?
What is it about beautiful writing that is beautiful? Is beauty just in the eye of the beholder? In other words, are we culturally conditioned to think some writing is beautiful? Or is there something universal in beautiful writing, something that exists beyond cultural relativity but is inherent in all human perceptions?
by Joe Bunting |
In an effort to win the heart of Zelda Sayre, F. Scott Fitzgerald finished his first novel, This Side of Paradise, at age twenty-three. Truman Capote caught the attention of Random House publishing with his story Miriam, just shy of his twenty-first birthday. When Ernest Hemingway was twenty-six he wrote The Sun Also Rises, and Mary Shelley completed the manuscript for Frankenstein at nineteen. Perhaps it’s just my own insecurities leaving me feeling rather inadequate with this knowledge, but I suspect I’m not alone.
by Joe Bunting |
It’s summer. For me, it is an unusual one, full of travels, visiting friends, family, and living on the road. While all this is great and exciting, the question of writing always remains at the back of my mind, awakening my conscience.
How to keep up writing on a summer schedule, outside the normal routine? More importantly, why make the effort of doing it there and then instead of sinking in the adventures and impressions to write about it later on?
by Joe Bunting |
I’m finally reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Nobel Prize Winning novel and one of the best selling books of all time. Gabriel GarcÃa Marquez’s novel about a small village in Colombia has become the best known work of magic realism, a literary genre that blends detailed realism with elements that couldn’t possibly exist.
There are things I like and things I don’t like about the novel, but apart from personal taste, it quickly became clear to me GarcÃa Márquez is a great writer, perhaps among the best writers alive (he’s eighty-six).
In this post, we will explore seven writing lessons we can learn from the Colombian master.
by Joe Bunting |
Writers, like all artists, are egotistical. In the good sense of the word, because this characteristic makes you work harder on getting better. However, on the other end of writers’ emotional processes is the feeling of intimidation. There’s always someone far greater than yourself, who’s raising the standards to an impossible level.
So, you’re moving from a territory of being completely intimidated, paralyzed with fear, to Herculean efforts to push through, and you enjoy occasional moments of bliss and satisfaction with your work.This is hard and exhausting, but also necessary.
