Posts Tagged: narrative
The Rumpus Interview with Micah Perks
Micah Perks talks about her new novel, What Becomes Us, America’s cultural and mythical heritage, and why every novel is a political novel.
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The Rumpus Review of One More Time with Feeling
“We didn’t ask for it,” Cave begins another poetic flight, and again we think he’s talking about something ghastly, “but it’s all around us, a gratuitous beauty.”
...moreHashtag at the Wedding
For The Hairpin, Ella Riley-Adams delves into the phenomenon of the wedding hashtag, and the ways we control and shape the narrative around crucial life milestones.
...moreNovelists Versus Machines
The Atlantic explains how Kurt Vonnegut’s lectures about story arcs influenced a group of researches to classify works of fiction based on six “core narratives” in order to find the “emotional trajectory of a story.” The research group hopes the data helps scientists to “train machines” to write original works.
...moreGrey Matters
This is how it started: Falling into the spaces between words, between ideas, between sentences. An infinite elbowing out of time, and time and space between. Gaps upon gaps upon gaps upon gaps. Reaching for the next sentence and then, the next word just… fell. What are we to do when the organ responsible for […]
...moreA Novelist’s Comics
Samuel Sattin considers the impact of writing comics to a novelist’s narrative sensibilities at Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
...moreA Narrative to Relate To
At Guernica, Elizabeth Karp-Evans interviews John Freeman, the founder of the literary journal Freeman’s, on freelancing, his goals for Freeman’s, and cultivating narratives: Narratives are individual; after that they become myths because you need to abstract a narrative to make it apply to many at once. Literature is of course subjective and universal when it’s great, […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Paul Lansky
Paul Lansky talks about his career as a pioneer in the world of electronic and computer-generated music.
...moreAn Editor’s High-Priced Advice
Submission fees irk writers because they often prey on novice writers without the connections to bypass slush piles. Narrative Magazine is one of the worst offenders, with a fee of $23, seven times the typical fee of $3. Narrative justifies the high fee because they fund publication of the magazine—and the editors’ hefty salaries. Now, co-founder Tom […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Erik Larson
Bestselling author Erik Larson talks about his new book, Dead Wake, his transition from journalism to history, and what, in his opinion, makes a first-rate nonfiction novel.
...moreThe Narrative of Zelda
In response to the news that Nintendo and Netflix may be developing a Legend of Zelda TV series, Ted Trautman at the Paris Review blog examines the character development and narrative structure (or lack thereof) of video games and wonders if it’s possible for a video game to tell a good story.
...moreThe Art of Interruptions
For The Millions, Steve Himmer writes about “the narrative possibilities of networked life.”
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The (Online) Stories We Tell
Sometimes you want to dream about the life you didn’t get to have. Sometimes you want to see the life you were lucky to escape.
...moreRewriting History
Salon has published an excerpt from Edward E. Baptist’s new book about the relationship between slavery and the development of capitalism in America. In it, he identifies the ways in which the American master narrative has written slavery out of our nation’s history and denied the system of mass murder and suffering on whose back […]
...moreGetting Personal for Better Narratives
Personal narratives offer writers an important source of inspiration for their writing. Writers edit out the dull portions of their lives to create a version that is both interesting and representative of a kind of universal experience. Kim Triedman writes at Beyond the Margins: It is a symbiotic relationship to the core. Our personal narratives […]
...moreFacebook as Storytelling Medium
From the epic poems of old to postmodernist novels, humans have always told stories. For the Millions, Annie Abrams looks at how Facebook affects our storytelling, applying narrative/literary insights from folks like J. M. Coetzee and Ralph Waldo Emerson. A preview: What happens, though, to the identities we take on in moments of freedom from […]
...moreCan You Tell A Story Without Conflict?
Conflict: a story needs one. It’s advice you hear in every creative-writing class, and a technique you see in every book, movie, and TV show. But what if a plot can move forward and keep the reader’s interest without inter-character discord? Art collective Still Eating Oranges has a great essay up about kishōtenketsu, a traditional Chinese/Japanese narrative […]
...moreBetter Living through Storytelling
One of the hardest parts of developing artificial intelligence, writes Frank Bures for Poets & Writers, is trying to teach computers causality: how and why one thing follows from another. Humans don’t have to be taught: We see causality constantly, incessantly, and effortlessly: when we read the news, when we gossip about neighbors, when we watch […]
...moreThe Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Because I have way too much time on my hands, and because it’s oddly fitting this week, the book blog roundup is in the form of a dialogue between a hopeless writer and his roommate, who is stoned and watching CSI. Writer: “Fiction is dead.” (via) Roommate: “Oh, everything’ll be fine. Dude, look! They just […]
...moreWorld’s most sinister dingbats
While browsing the web during a slow pre-holiday weekend day at work, I stumbled across a font family called Vialog, which is intended to be used primarily in signage. One of the fonts in the family, Vialog Signs Conduct, contains some of the most sinister glyphs I’ve ever seen. You could practically storyboard a thriller, […]
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