readings: essays & articles

• reassuring ghosts and haunted houses
• fish recorded singing dawn chorus on reefs just like birds
• what people around the world dream about
• poet and philosopher david whyte on anger, forgiveness, and what maturity really means
• oranges are orange, salmon are salmon
• how memories persist where bodies and even brains do not
• the avant-garde musical legacy of the moomins
• the weight of our living: on hope, fire escapes, and visible desperation
• disturbed minds and disruptive bodies
• what is better ー a happy life or a meaningful one?
• after my dad died, i started sending him emails. months later, someone wrote me back
• on the igbo art of storytelling
• what the caves are trying to tell us
• promethean beasts — how animal uses of fire help illuminate human pyrocognition
• the art of loving and losing female friends
• on memorizing poetry
• the ecological imagination of hayao miyazaki
• reading in the age of constant distraction
• holly warburton illustrates tender moments of love and light
• romancing the fig: what one fruit can tell us about love, life and human civilization
• mystery and birds: 5 ways to practice poetry
• can a plant remember? this one seems to — here's the evidence
• why female cannibals frighten and fascinate
• when you give a tree an email adress
• fear not — horror movies build community and emotional resilience

anyway… if anyone is looking to improve their reading & writing skills, i highly recommend this article by celine nguyen, which analyses the opening paragraphs of good essays to understand how and why they work. focuses on nonfiction but could apply generally i think

A lot of fiction these days reads as if—as I saw Peter Raleigh put it the other day, and as I’ve discussed it before—the author is trying to describe a video playing in their mind. Often there is little or no interiority. Scenes play out in “real time” without summary. First-person POV stories describe things the character can’t see, but a distant camera could. There’s an overemphasis on characters’ outfits and facial expressions, including my personal pet peeve: the “reaction shot round-up” in which we get a description of every character’s reaction to something as if a camera was cutting between sitcom actors.

When I talk with other creative writing professors, we all seem to agree that interiority is disappearing. Even in first-person POV stories, younger writers often skip describing their character’s hopes, dreams, fears, thoughts, memories, or reactions. This trend is hardly limited to young writers though. I was speaking to an editor yesterday who agreed interiority has largely vanished from commercial fiction, and I think you increasingly notice its absence even in works shelved as “literary fiction.” When interiority does appear on the page, it is often brief and redundant with the dialogue and action. All of this is a great shame. Interiority is perhaps the prime example of an advantage prose as a medium holds over other artforms.

fascinated by this article, "Turning Off the TV in Your Mind," about the influences of visual narratives on writing prose narratives. i def notice the two things i excerpted above in fanfic, which i guess makes even more sense as most of the fic i read is for tv and film. i will also be thinking about its discussion of time in prose - i think that's something i often struggle with and i will try to be more conscious of the differences between screen and page next time i'm writing.

okay i did not expect this untagged post to get any traction behind it, and it's been interesting reading some of the notes, but OH MAN it is driving me nuts to see how many people are adding 'well, it's because we're taught to show not tell! interiority is telling!'

my dude. 'she looked at the sunset and felt sad.' is interiority that's telling. 'she looked at the sunset and remembered the days of walking home from school with her father, hand in hand. in those days, the colours always seemed more vibrant. today, as the sun dropped behind her childhood home, the shadow seemed to creep upwards, muting the sky as well as the earth. she took a deep breath, refusing to let yet more tears fall.'

that's a thirty-second quick hypothetical, but that is also interiority, and that is showing.

this continues to putter along and i am certainly not reading all the reblogs and tags, but someone somewhere shared a link to against casting-tape fiction: first person narrative and interiority, which also has some interesting bits. it talks specifically about first-person, bit i think much of it is more broadly applicable:

I believe that writers have internalized a similar set of ideas and conventions [as to when viewers watch reality television]. Their characters do not act or are not seen to be acting. We open in media res without context as to who these people are or what they care about or what they need, and we just watch them walk down streets and bump into people and sometimes, sometimes, there’s a little thought about what’s going on in their lives, maybe, if you’re lucky. The deracinated I in contemporary first-person fiction is like a reality tv show played without the volume. It’s a string of arbitrary actions.

[...] there is a tendency toward oppressive passiveness. It seems to me that many writers, particularly beginning writers, are after the sense they get when they watch a close-up of Isabelle Huppert’s face in furious silence in The Piano Teacher. Or the sense of implication they get from watching Viola Davis’s quivering lips, wordless, but moved by great emotion. They want that. They write their first-person narrators with mute interiority because they are mimicking what they have seen without the skills or the understanding or acute sensitivity to understand what is going on inside of those women. They are after the silence of the blasted female consciousness, so denuded and effaced by suffering and trauma that their faces project a gorgeous, raging silence.

i think passiveness/arbitrariness is a big reason why i nope out of so many stories in the first few paragraphs. i have really noticed lately that there is a lot of writing out there that just feels like a list of what a character is doing, without any thought to the why or to how the character's actions affect or are affected by their emotions. again, the article captures how this feels:

It’s like the reader is expected to just open the book and follow along watching a string of events with no shape and no meaning, and no sense of why the narrator is presenting them to us.

of a good example of interiority, the article author says (emphasis mine):

Even in their passive moments, when they are holding back or not acting for fear of reprisal, the narrative itself never feels passive because the characters are thinking through their motivations, their fears, their anxieties, their favorite singer, their favorite movie, what their mother made for dinner, what they’re going to do when they got home. The narratives operate via thought. People thinking as they move through life. Even when the intense or dangerous situation arises, the characters process it, think through it, react, respond. We do not linger on their face as is the case in some first-person narratives. Instead, we unfurl the network of responses and relations to the event so that the character emerges brighter and more vivid in our minds rather than murky.

also quite liked this bit about characters who are not forthcoming or honest about their intentions/past/whatever (emphasis again mine):

Even when we do not want to think about something, we think about something else, no? Even when we try very hard not to look at the grossest parts of ourselves, we look somewhere else, no? A character who cannot speak on a subject is only interesting dramatically if they speak on something else so that what they do say and do express bears the imprint of what is unsaid. And indeed, that is only interesting if the reader has some sense of what is unsaid or that there is something unsaid. Otherwise, we’re just watching a person be boring and incommunicative. And what is the point of that?

interesting to see a couple of different people discussing the same topic and tying it to a similar underlying cause, anyway.

collective