Home For Fiction – Blog

for thinking people


How to Write a Novel about… – Three Questions Answered

November 8, 2021

Remember that post about five questions people ask Google about Dracula? It was inspired by Google’s autocomplete feature that reveals the most common questions about a certain topic as you begin typing. This leaves room for incredible stupidity – I’ve discovered people ask Google “Is the moon made of cheese?Perhaps I should’ve said "ignorance" instead of "stupidity". It’s plausible – a well-meaning individual might say – that the question is asked by very young children. On the other hand, I have a great memory, I remember my childhood very well, and I can assure you, though there was no internet when I was a kid, I certainly didn’t think the moon was made of cheese. Parenthetically, other questions are "Is the moon a planet?" and "Is the moon a star?"” – however it’s also an interesting tool for social research. In today’s post, I examine three questions beginning with “How to write a novel about…”

As with the Dracula post, starting this one I have no idea what I’ll get if I begin typing “how to write a novel about”, so I’ll brace myself and begin. Let’s get started!

How to write a novel about
How to write a novel about…
(more…)

The Industrialization of the Arts: Meaning in a Capitalist Framework

November 1, 2021

Today’s post – “The Industrialization of the Arts: Meaning in a Capitalist Framework” – 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. Check out his papers on Academia.edu, his music on Bandcamp, and his personal musings on his blog – in Portuguese, Spanish/Castilian, and English. You can also find him on LinkedIn.

The lack of exploration of style, and the absence of style development strikes me as a trait of the industrialization of the arts. The artist no longer has to make poetry, no longer has to open up worlds to be experienced in all their familiarity or strangeness; now the artist must only provoke intense subjective experiences one after another.

It is an impoverishment of art to the level of killing it and reducing it to the same criteria as plain entertainment. I call it the aestheticization of life. The whole life has been made the object of aesthetics.

industrialization of arts
The industrialization of the arts involves art-as-fetish
(more…)

Text to Art: Turn Your Novel into an Art Design

October 25, 2021

Translating texts into other forms of art is something that fascinates me. Especially when some sort of semi-random, computer-mediated process is involved. There’s something idealistic about it, having to do with aesthetics, beauty, and the meaning behind art which, remember, is holistic. And so, Text to Art is a little program I put together to explore this very thing: How turning a text – a poem, a novel, or a simple sentence – into a visual design would look like.

text to art
Text to Art is a program that generates unique visual designs from a given text
(more…)