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The Place of Style in Thinking about Literature

October 16, 2023

creativity, guest post, Igor Livramento, literature, writing

Today’s post – “The Place of Style in Thinking about Literature” – is authored by Igor da Silva Livramento. He’s a fellow academic from UFSC, fellow author, fellow creative-writing advisor, and overall a great fellow. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. You can find him on LinkedIn and here is his own blog.

Art is contact with the inhuman that dwells in all of us: be it the animalistic and abject subhuman – as in Lautréamont, Clive Barker, Artaud, Pierre Guyotat – or the angelic and sanctified superhuman – as in the biblical psalmist, Rōdhakī, Hāfez or Petrarch. Style, therefore, is not a form of individual expression, externalization of the soul, exposition of a supposed interior, but the making up of a just form (fair, as in Law, fit, as in Fashion). This form is just because it is homologous to the world, it follows the same logic as the world (homo-logos): as obscure, dense and impenetrable as the matter of the day.

Style, therefore, is the way to make things – ideas, beings, moments – last in time, which means that language also lasts to allow this lasting. It thus opens up the chance for a reader to place their own time transversely in the timed chronometer of work and routine.

style and thinking about literature — Style, thinking, literature. Art. Language.

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Literary Analysis of Three Excerpts I Like; of my Own Fiction

October 9, 2023

Fiction

book, creativity, criticism, fiction, literature, writing

Ah, yes; another egotistical post. A bit like the one where I essentially reviewed my own work. But as there was value in that, there is value in this one, too. A literary analysis of three excerpts of my own fiction can be revealing to you for two reasons:

As a writer, it shows you how to critically approach your own work; why you like something, how it made you feel. Doing so helps you gauge your writing and move past the “first book” stage (with or without quotation marks).
As a reader, you get a “behind the scenes” of writing. Not only does this offer you unique insights in regard to the writing process, but – which is more important – makes you a better reader, too.

Naturally, in order for this post to be accessible to anyone, whether they have read the books or not, I have selected the excerpts in a way that they don’t depend on their context. Not too directly, at least.

anime image of woman and man. Literary analysis of three excerpts — If *The Other Side of Dreams* were an anime, Anna and Ahmed – the two main characters – would perhaps look like this, walking the streets of Rome on a summer evening

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Three Kinds of Imagination and How To Use Them in Your Writing

September 18, 2023

Experiencing, Writing

experiencing, imagination, literature, philosophy, society, writing

Are there “kinds of imagination”? It would seem all imagination is, if not the same, at least “good”. “Imagination is all I want from you” an 80s song goes – yes, I’m getting old – and with only minimal… imagination, we can totally picture a writer looking in the mirror and whispering these magic words.

After all, it would seem impossible to write without imagination, since it refers to our ability to form ideas, have thoughts, or even experience emotions that, though perhaps inspired by our environment, are not directly available to our senses.

For example, when you see a red car brightly reflecting the afternoon sunshine and it triggers a memory from your childhood, that’s imagination. Indeed, if you can “see” a red car reflecting the sun while you’re reading these lines, that’s imagination too!

However, imagination is a tricky concept. Because of its abstract nature, imagination can come in various forms – as perhaps you noticed already in the few paragraphs above. For instance, it takes one kind of imagination to watch a film and then write a review about it, and entirely another to create a modern art installation.

The key issue, then, is to be able to recognize these forms imagination takes, and take advantage of them according to the needs of our writing. As I will show you in this post, we could think of three kinds of imagination – creative, productive, and reproductive – each with its own patterns and applications.

kinds of imagination; red car — This image “doesn’t exist” in that it’s not a real photo; it’s made with Bing Image Creator. However, it also makes me **imagine** a multitude of things, because it’s anchored in childhood images – which also reveals the power of AI for writers, in ways they don’t quite realize!

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