How We Create Ourselves: Second Place by Rachel Cusk
The voice reaches and reaches at answers to broad questions. Sometimes it pulls back pieces of insight and beauty.
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Posts Tagged: plot
The Story Is the Concepts: Philosophizing with Ryan Ruby
Ryan Ruby talks about his debut novel The Zero and the One, the challenges of pacing and plot, and the fun of inventing a book of philosophy for the novel.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #71: Kris D’Agostino
In Kris D’Agostino’s second novel, The Antiques, he returns to familiar forms: A dysfunctional family whose members are in various stages of arrested development; a generational home in upstate New York; and the absurdity of life in its most darkly comedic moments. Here, the three grown (yet hardly mature) children of the Westfall family reunite […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Leslie Pietrzyk
Think about the stories you have inside that scare you. That’s what you should be writing.
...moreThe Unfolding of a Hidden Design
Plot has lost its prestige. Fighting against what he perceives as a changing of values in the modern novel, John Mullan writes an ode to plot, from the masterworks of Dickens and le Carré to the serialized TV dramas we all know and love.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Sari Wilson
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Sari Wilson about her new book Girl Through Glass, the demands of the dance world, and New York City as a character.
...moreTell Don’t Show, Like Wikipedia
Do not make me decipher your intent. Do not assume allegorical common ground. Do not make me pay attention to your god damn motif. Tell don’t show, like Wikipedia. A blunt argument for the straight story in fiction, over at The Toast.
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The Rumpus Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch discusses her latest book, The Small Backs of Children, war, art, the chaos of experience, and that photograph of the vulture stalking the dying child in the Sudan that won the Pulitzer Prize.
...moreEvery Word Counts
Great writers, along with everything else they are doing, stage a readerly experience and lead their readers through it from first word on first page to last. Mapping out what those paths might look like is as worthy a critical approach as any. At the Paris Review blog, Damion Searls takes a new approach to […]
...morePlotting Plot
With the help of math and computers, a University of Nebraska English professor has been plotting the basic shapes of novels (spoiler: there are six), but this time in a new way. Instead of focusing on plot as action, Matthew Jockers is tracking the positive or negative charge of words to reveal plot as emotional […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Luke B. Goebel
Luke B. Goebel talks about his experimental novel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, his dark days in San Francisco, hands as blood-bags, and literary Ouija boards.
...moreWorld History Plot Holes?
A meteor killing off the dinosaurs was obviously a cop out because the author didn’t know where to take the story. This was just one of several responses on Reddit’s thread “Assume all of world history is a movie. What are the biggest plot holes?” that are good for a few chuckles. Grist for the […]
...morePlotlines in the Digital Age
Nowadays technology is not just changing how we interact with books and movies, but it has changed the plotlines themselves. It has changed the way fictional characters interact with each other, the believability of the plot—it’s destabilizing the fictional landscape. Jon Queenan discusses the evolution of the script with the intrusion of new technologies in […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Dan Chaon
“The feeling of being an outsider, and the identity theme, are hardwired into me. If there’s anything really autobiographical in my fiction, it’s that feeling. I always feel that way.”
...moreThe Un-formulaic Life of the Man Who Invented the Movie Formula
Wycliffe A. Hill is the grandfather of the cookie cutter Hollywood movie. Author of Ten Million Photoplay Plots: The Master Key to All Dramatic Plots, which was published in 1919, Hill created an assembly line approach to writing screenplays: character + dramatic situation + setting = movie. For example: “An old man wrongfully accused of […]
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