beautiful mess

Moana . 29 . Classics PhD.

[huckleberryhal]

Mary Oliver in “Dog Songs”

[the960writers]

Turning Off the TV in Your Mind

Thoughts on flipping from "TV brain" to "prose brain" when writing fiction

Lincoln Michel Dec 12, 2024

I’m using “TV” as a shorthand for any visual narrative art from feature length films to video games. A lot of fiction these days reads as if—as I saw Peter Raleigh put it the other day, and as I’ve discussed it before—the author is trying to describe a video playing in their mind. Often there is little or no interiority. Scenes play out in “real time” without summary. First-person POV stories describe things the character can’t see, but a distant camera could. There’s an overemphasis on characters’ outfits and facial expressions, including my personal pet peeve: the “reaction shot round-up” in which we get a description of every character’s reaction to something as if a camera was cutting between sitcom actors.

[...]

My theory is that we live in the age of visual narratives and that increasingly warps how we write. Film, TV, TikToks, and video games are culturally dominant. Most of us learn how stories work through visual mediums. This is how our brains have been taught to think about story. And so, this is how we write. I’m not suggesting there is any problem in being influenced by these artforms. I certainly am. The problem is that if you’re “thinking in TV” while writing prose, you abandon the advantages of prose without getting the advantages of TV.

[...]

When I talk with other creative writing professors, we all seem to agree that interiority is disappearing. Even in first-person POV stories, younger writers often skip describing their character’s hopes, dreams, fears, thoughts, memories, or reactions. This trend is hardly limited to young writers though. I was speaking to an editor yesterday who agreed interiority has largely vanished from commercial fiction, and I think you increasingly notice its absence even in works shelved as “literary fiction.” When interiority does appear on the page, it is often brief and redundant with the dialogue and action. All of this is a great shame. Interiority is perhaps the prime example of an advantage prose as a medium holds over other artforms.

[rosenkranz-does-things]

happy severance day! here's some studies I've done while waiting for the new episode

[soracities]

Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

[Text ID: “As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard.”]

[seekingstars]

HOW’S THAT HOUSE THAT RAISED YOU? - Lev St. Valentine

[huariqueje]

Unknown, Green Bathroom - Line Holtegaard , 2024.

Danish , b, 1980 -

Oil on canvas , 150 x 100 cm.

[firstfullmoon]

https://www.instagram.com/subwayhands/

[unreadable]

[caemidraws]

Raven Queen

[brainstatic]

Dante’s Inferno is the best piece of classical poetry because it’s the most petty thing you will ever read. Half of Hell is mythological or historical figures and the other half is Dante’s enemies. So the whole thing is like “I am Medea, who slew her own child to spite her husband.” “And I am Francisco di Vincezzino Fabriccia, who gets very talented and handsome poets kicked out of Florence, but I’m very sorry for it now because I’m burning in Hell and I suck.”

[brainstatic]

I feel I should add that because it was the Middle Ages and literacy was next to non-existent, poets made their money by reciting their poems in public. And The Divine Comedy is written in the first person. So the way this was originally presented was Dante himself standing on a stage and saying “so then me and my best friend Virgil went to the circle of whiny bitches and we saw Giovanni Petucci getting eaten by a giant dog, because he’s a bitch, and he was all “ah help me Dante I’m so sorry I thought the Holy Roman Emperor was better than the Pope, you were right about everything”, and then Virgil –again whom I’m extremely close with– said it was too late for him.”

[huariqueje]

Garden Inn  -   Oskar Laske, 1945.

Austrian, 1874 - 1951

Watercolor and gouache on paper ,  38.5 x 43.4 cm

[chewbacca]

He could put “you” at the end of that, and say “I know you.” The idea that these two people know each other, knew each other when they first saw each other. That they recognized each other from their future. Pride & Prejudice (2005) dir. Joe Wright

[oozins]

NOT EVERYTHING FEELS LIKE SOMETHING ELSE

[thepinkpestilence]

one of the biggest cultural gaslights happened when people started to treat dracula by bram stoker as a dark romance story instead of the victorian og scooby doo shenanigans

[gringolet]

INTRO TO ARTHURIANA MASTERPOST

under the cut for absurd length

Keep reading

[fatefatale]

“[Art] should prepare us for tenderness. And in this regard it starts, I think, with intention… Our intention is to crack life open for just a second.”

— Anton Chekhov

[lilliankillthisman]

Everyone thinks of Austen as victorian and Stalin as russian but they were actually both georgian... one of many shared traits