Posts Tagged: narrative

The Rumpus Interview with Micah Perks

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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

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“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.”

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A Narrative to Relate To

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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

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Paul Lansky talks about his career as a pioneer in the world of electronic and computer-generated music.

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An Editor’s High-Priced Advice

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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

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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.

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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The (Online) Stories We Tell

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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.

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Rewriting History

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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 […]

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Getting Personal for Better Narratives

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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 […]

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Facebook as Storytelling Medium

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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 […]

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Can You Tell A Story Without Conflict?

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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 […]

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Better Living through Storytelling

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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 […]

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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup

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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 […]

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World’s most sinister dingbats

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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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