Mr. Chuck Wendig, esq put up a flash fiction challenge earlier this week: spin a thousand-word yarn riff off the term “Irregular Creatures”. Now, I’m exactly the sort of person to say no to a challenge, but I had a look at some of the excellent entries (don’t miss Marko Kloos’s Seeds if you have […]
As someone who is still trying to get published, I see a lot of outfits trying very hard to milk people like me for money. They play to our egos and our vanity. I’ll be honest, I sometimes get rejections back and think bad thoughts to myself about editorial taste — but I shake it […]
Hello! I hope you all have been enjoying the Argument posts. I’m getting a new batch ready, which will take some time, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to get some feedback. Uhh… what do you think? 🙂 I hope I’ve made plain that I’m not an expert on this subject: this […]
This will be a short one, I think. In the broader subject of rhetoric, there are five canons, one of which is the systematic search for argument, the Inventio. The subject of stasis, which I discussed last time, comes out of the Inventio. So does the subject of ethos, which I’ll talk about today. These two […]
I’m very glad I allowed myself to be talked into attending Boskone — I had a real blast. I got to see a number of people I knew (though I’m sorry that I had so little time to talk to most of them) got to meet a number of people I knew only from conversations […]
(If you missed the previous parts, you can start here. Go on, I’ll wait for you. ETA: This post actually stands on its own quite well. Feel free to read this one first then go back, I think you won’t be confused.) This is a long one, but I think important. There are two large […]
If you missed the first two parts, they can be found here: (Part I, Part II) At some point I’ll put together an index page. Two Dimensions of Argument In the previous two parts, I first argued that you can divide arguments in stories up according to whether they try to argue a specific point […]
In my previous post on argument, I talked about what I saw as one basic division in story arguments. I suggested that there were two basic kinds of arguments being made in fiction: where there is a point being put forward, and where the story is being used to explore multiple sides of an argument […]
I recently finished David Zarefsky’s audio course on argumentation and reasoning. (Yes, I buy things out of mail-order catalogs. Leave me alone.) In that course he went into great detail in explaining how arguments work, what kinds of arguments we come across, how they succeed and fail. Many of these aspects of making and responding to […]
A perennial subject among the writers I know is whether it is better to write by hand or to type. This post in particular was prompted by my reading this post about some of the quantitative differences between writing longhand or by computer. There’s some interesting stuff in there, and in the paper it’s based […]
