for thinking people
December 9, 2018
This article is a part of a series of blog entries, which I refer to as “Authors Talk”. You can think of it as an author interview and, indeed, that is the name of the blog category. However, I prefer to see it as a friendly chat between fellow authors. Today I’m having this virtual chat with Scott Peters, author of – among others – adventure stories set in ancient Egypt. A detailed list of useful links to Scott Peters’s work can be found at the end of this article.
December 3, 2018
As a fiction writer, you create worlds. You create a different reality, populating it with characters and meaning. In essence, the role of writing as art is to inspire affect – that is, an emotion, a thought, or a state of mind. And learning how to manipulate readers can be an integral part of this endeavor.
At first, the idea of an author manipulating readers might sound controversial. This is probably a result of the connotations the word “manipulation” contains. But, as with so many other things, the controversy stops once you realize what manipulating an audience really refers to in this context.
Manipulating your readers creatively has nothing to do with writing gimmicks. The former is a legitimate literary device; the latter has nothing to do with the art.
In today’s article I’ll show you:
November 27, 2018
It almost sounds like the name of a newspaper, doesn’t it? Hypocrisy Today. I don’t know if patterns of human behavior are timeless or not, maybe they are. Or, perhaps, it is only their drives that are unchangeable.
In other words, maybe love, hate, and the desire for power are eternal, whereas courtship, warfare, and hypocrisy depend on a given culture and society. Hypocrisy today might not be the same as it once was.
If something has changed in the way hypocrisy today propagates, that is certainly the levels of audacity it can reach. To put it simply, there used to be a fig leaf covering hypocritical actions. Politicians didn’t dare to lie blatantly. This has changed, drastically.
As any self-respecting author, fiction is for me a way to express the inexpressible, to channel a savage need to understand reality. And so, I’ve been lately working on a novel that is partly about hypocrisy in today’s world.
Instead of writing an article about it, here’s an excerpt from this upcoming novelI am referring to Illiterary Fiction. I have slightly modified it for online use.
