I spend a lot of time thinking about the creative process from a practical point of view, but not much thinking about the nature of creativity itself. So, I was intrigued when I came upon a reference to Graham Wallas’s Stages of Creativity. (quoting Wikipedia here) (i) preparation (preparatory work on a problem that focuses the […]
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 […]
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 […]
(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 […]
I just sent in my fifth fiction submission of the new year. If you count the one that’s waiting on a February submissions opening, I have five stories actively on the market. That’s not bad, but looking at what’s in progress, I’m going to have trouble keeping that up: I’m pretty thoroughly stalled out on […]
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 […]
John P. Murphy 