(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 […]
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 […]
I had a fascinating conversation with a friend of mine the other day about the preferred term for someone who writes. I had always had a vague impression that the term “author” was the more pretentious term for writing (particularly fiction) but my friend (who is free to identify herself in comments; I just can’t […]
It does not take the most incisive literary analysis to say that murder mysteries are about death. Someone turns an alive person into a dead one, other people react to that, and a detective (sometimes as the representative of larger society) examines the death in an effort to learn how and why. There is an […]
(Update: I’ve posted more on this subject here) In my professional life, I deal with metrics on a regular basis. Computer and network security in particular is (in my opinion) struggling with the transition from a qualitative to quantitative field. And hey, at heart I’m a quant: I find it easier to improve aspects of […]
How appropriate that I have a crick in my neck! 2010 is the year I got serious about writing: No more fiddling around writing (just) for my friends, no more getting one rejection and sulking for months. All together, I figure I wrote about 50,000 words of fiction this year. I didn’t sell a damn thing, but […]
In a sense, I’ve been writing for a long time. I started writing little stories for myself in grade school (mostly inspired by television), and by the time I got to high school I was writing short stories to pass around to my friends. I even wrote a few one-act plays that were performed. In […]
I just sent off my 20th fiction submission since I started writing again last year! Those 20 submissions are of six stories, four of them mysteries. I only have one complete story I’ve never submitted, and I have one story that I submitted seven times. (“Till Hell won’t have it” indeed…) All submissions were rejected, […]
John P. Murphy 