Terrified, by Dall-e
Someone challenged me to write a graphic novel of my short story A Bang on the Head, which forms the basis of my experiments in style, à la Queneau. Well, I’m useless at drawing the kind of comics I like to read, so I thought I’d enlist the help of AI. I used this prompt, mistakenly, with ChatGPT…
Read MoreThis book arrived recently, and I’m very much enjoying reading it. It’s a kind of guided tour or survey of the types of fiction that have appeared in the last fifty years (mainly).
Read MoreI recently reviewed How Words Get Good for Teach Secondary magazine. It’s a great read, and delves into all the processes that go into producing a book.
Read MoreI asked Claude.AI to create some personas for my writing about different forms of writing. What was the result?
Read MoreLitotes, pronounced lie-toe-tease, is a literary technique whereby you express things in a negative formulation. What would it look like if a whole story was written in this fashion?
By the way, if you’ve been thinking of taking out a premium subscription for my Eclecticism newsletter, the mega deal of 20% off forever ends tomorrow, 22nd August 2023.
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Picture by Dall-e
Poetry lovers will recall the impact Slake' s first book made. "Tied up in Notts" was, at the time, not merely avant-garde but positively risque. The reason, of course, was Slake's cavalier approach to poetic conventions. For example, his 15 Line Sonnet caused a massive rift in the arts community.
Read MoreThis is the usual way of doing things. Someone writes a book, or a poem or whatever. Then (with a bit of luck) someone reviews it.
A fellow writer, Nathan, and I decided to do it the other way around. He wrote a review of something I hadn’t written yet. Then I wrote it!
Read MoreWhy do some writers write badly? Plus links to examples of bad writing.
Read MoreMost books on creative writing tend to be less technical, at least in appearance, than ‘Sentence models’.
Read MoreSome of the essay topics may be a little dated – the failure of the Italian novel being one – but such is the clarity and variety of his work that the actual subject matter starts to feel immaterial.
Read MoreI wrote this article in 2020. Having read it again, I still agree with the views I expressed then. In fact, I’d go further. When anyone who has achieved the benefits potentially offered by X tells you that you don’t need X, I think a huge dollop of cynicism is in order.
Read MoreOulipo techniques are great for dispelling writer’s block, and generating new works.
Read MoreSome time ago I wrote: “Paradoxically, a spell-checker is only useful if you can spell! It's a common misunderstanding that if you can't spell, a spell-checker will sort things out for you. It won't.” Is this still true?
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Three reviews in one article, plus a couple of news announcements.
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London Book Fair Hi-Res, by Terry Freedman
London Book Fair 23 Directory and social media links.
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London Book Fair, by Terry Freedman
These are the sessions that especially appeal to me
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London Book Fair, by Terry Freedman
The London Book Fair is back again this year, in Olympia. As usual there are loads of seminars and even more stands. And if you’re an author, there is even more reason to attend.
Read MoreYou might think that recording an interview, and then transcribing it using an app like Otter, would be much faster than writing everything down at the time.
Read MoreWhy I can’t read Lolita, but am reading Nabokov’s short stories.
Read MoreWhere do authors’ ideas come from? Even Stephen King finds that a difficult question to answer. One possible answer might be ‘Everything they see on their travels’, because as Roland Barthes once suggested, writers are never truly on holiday…
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