Last year, when I was studying a text on cultural anthropology, I found myself thinking that it is a poorly written textbook. I found myself trying to mentally rewrite the textbook such that it makes more sense to me. And then a thought occurred to me: academic progress has been stalled by bad writing. It…
Shaking Writing Stagnation with Forrester's Insights
I awoke this morning with nothing to do, so I flipped on my television to Starz. Much to my delight, Gus Van Sant's Finding Forrester was playing. The stagnation in my writing habits were quickly lifted away when Forrester began speaking to Jamal about writing. Of the process, he says that a writer must just…
The First or Third? A Return to the Question of Perspective
My training as a writer and storyteller came from watching movies, which is a third-person format. It's why I naturally gravitated towards the third-person perspective. Like a camera, I conveyed the story through an objective lens, with limited access to the characters' minds. But I suppose that, upon reexamination of the nature of the strengths…
On The Transparently Autobiographic Voice
How many times have you picked up a book, read its synopsis, and then read the bio, only to find that the author is from the same town that the book is set in? And then, doing a little more research, how many times do you discover that the protagonist of the book is remarkably…
Mister Marky and The Turtle
Every afternoon on Mondays through Fridays, the children from the first grade at the Theodore Ersiday Elementary school would line up by the side exit near the schoolyard and await their parents. Rowdy young boys and chatty young girls were itching to run off to do something—anything would do—and their irascible shuffling noises filled the…
