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Of the many narrative features I study, narrative voice is currently on my plate. Up front, I want to be clear, studying writing as a reader, a critic, or a writer are different processes and approaches from each other. A reader's approach may only be aesthetic hunches and sensibilities. A critic may approach from a lifestyle sensibility, judging the artistic and social merits of any given work or writer. Or a critic may interpret method, meaning, and intent. I favor the latter critic for the critic's focus on writing principles, skills, and features.
And writers to varying degrees study writing or not. A main distinction for a writer studying writing from those of readers and more importantly critics is the writer's standing to the work. Writers to varying degrees borrow method and meaning from works that came before theirs; however, principally, writers are creators of products, where critics and readers are auditors of those creations.
Seymour Chatman in Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film and Damon Knight in Creating Short Fiction: The Classic Guide to Writing Short Fiction, both cover aspects of narrative voice. Knight's poetics text is more generally accessible than Chatman's, though Chatman's is more focused and detailed. Chatman's is in sophisticated territories, though not as advanced as some of the poetics texts he cites, like Roland Barthes, Noam Chomsky, Percy Lubbock, and Wayne Booth, pillars all in the assorted poetics, linguistics, semiotics, and semantics communities.
The reason I've undertaken this at times tedious and grueling study, and at times inspirational, is part of a larger process examining and interpreting distinctions between published and at least popularly acclaimed works, if not crictially acclaimed, and the prose of struggling writers, myself included.
Passing over the nonetheless important mechanical aspects of narrative, like mechanical style and craft functions like structure and plot, organization and content, focusing on voice, I've learned a distinction between struggling writers' prose and published prose. This is a ground swell epiphany, building relevance to a height I can only at this moment imagine.
Knight distinguishes several axes of narrative discourse: grammatical person (first, second, third, etc.), degree of access to character voice (narrative distance), degree of access to thoughts (psychic distance), narrator attitude (objective or subjective). Chatman similarly distinguishes these aspects though in greater minutia and expanded detail using some different terms.
The emerging epiphany I'm having relates to narrative voice--the narrator of any given work--the Omnipotent Hand of the real writer's voice, and most essentially the invisible though ominpresent implied writer's voice. Examining samples of thirteen lines excerpts here as well as other writing workshop discussion boards elsewhere, like authonomy.com, and sampling self-published works from the array of online booksellers, I've realized why many thousands if not millions of narratives feel identical; that is, they have identical implied writer and narrator voices. These voices, or this voice, is everyday conversational language, and about as organized as a casual conversation among several participants at a crowded coffee shop. And with as much head turning, neck whiplashing, elbow and backside jostling, speech interruptions, and broken trains of thought as in that coffee shop.
Telling the action (anecdote, vignette, gossip, rumor, legend, fable, folk tale, daydream, pipedream, nightmare, whatever) in a summary and explanation lecture from a secondhand perspective to listeners is that voice.
This voice is the traditional one of Romanticism that was most vogue prior to the middle nineteenth century, when Realism arose, followed by Modernism and, in turn, Postmodernism. Audiences for that voice were limited to sophisticated readers who could afford literature. Technological, cultural, vocational, and publishing business innovations placed literature within reach of most everyone, but changes in voice, accessiblity, and appeal had to and did follow suit.
The conclusion I've come to that is a jumping-off point from which to make cognitive leaps is that millions of narratives are in the same identical voice of the implied writer performing narratives as everyday commonplaces for audiences. Narratives that I especially enjoy and broad and numerous audiences appreciate have a different voice, or many different voices internally as well as across the gamut. These voices respect an ancient and time-honored composition principle first espoused by dusty old bones Plato.
Exegesis, diagesis, and mimesis are the Greek terms Plato and other ancient Greek poeticists use: respectively, explanation, summarization, and imitation, or telling, telling, and showing. I've been aware of the principle that telling or storytelling is a narrator reports a dramatic action to an implied as if real or actual audience. This is a voice of a raconteur storyteller performing a narrative around a campfire to companions present, for example, mixing exegesis, diagesis, and a little mimesis.
However, the narrative voice most favored by audiences, in Plato's time as well as now and for the foreseeable future is mimesis.
A distinction between the two voices is one is reported by the narrator as if it occurred sometime in the past, like journalism reports news. The other, mimesis, unfolds the action as though it is happening here and now, just this moment, in this place, in this situation happened. Mimesis imitates an action as though witnessed by an invisible bystander or vicariously participated in by a reader. This has been on my mind for years, though how to manage mimesis as well as numerous other necessities of prose has held me back.
I've gotten a working understanding now. My dawning appreciation for voice and all its complexities hasn't come easily. The latest epiphanies came from close rereading of Knight's and Chatman's poetics texts. Neither of which would have been accesible at all if I hadn't also studied hundreds of other poetics texts, spanning Plato and Aristotle up to, through, and beyond Algis Budry's and Orson Scott Card's.
A few years ago, I had strong resistance to reading poetics texts, burned out from mandatory reading of less than insightful assigned texts. Now, doing so has become an end in its own light, but oh my, what a glorious opus I've come to appreciate and enjoy in all its splendor. One of the most intriguing outcomes is an appreciation for mechanical style and its application to craft, voice, and audience appeal. Oh my, grammar is so much more than a set of "rules" or even guiding principles; it is the fount from which all creative, expressive writing waters spring.
posted
Congratulations, extrinsic. It is to be hoped that we may benefit from some of the insights you've received reading worthy and artful poetic texts.
Perhaps you could recommend, as an exercise, a close reading of one particular text, and then, after we've had time to do so, we could discuss what we've gleaned and compare it to what you've found in that same reading?
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posted
I've thought long and hard for years about whether any one poetics text is a best practice starting point for writers. One is, but inaccessibly obtuse. Not surprisingly, I recommend The Poetics of Aristotle as a starting place for a comparable to any subsequent poetics essay, every one in some way derivative of that seminal work.
The Poetics comprehensively covers the four principle creative writing areas of audience appeal, voice, craft, and how mechanical style applies to those influences. One of the more inaccessible features is the texts the Poetics cites: works from Aristotle's time like Homer's, Sophocles', Aeschylus's, and Euripides', among others. The poets' names are easily enough too alienating on their own for a general discussion, let alone the texts themselves, the dramatic poems of the poets and of the Poetics itself.
"Poetics" is a term used since Aristotle's times to mean, as it's come to be translated, narrative theory, narratology, or persuasive writing theory.
Advantages, though, are the Poetics is freely and widely available, Project Gutenberg and archive.com host the authoritive edition and the texts the Poetics cites, hence easily accessed and cited by copy and paste and in the public domain. Also, the Poetics is comparatively short length, though dense, compared to book length essays by others. I don't think ease of access to the texts outweighs the inaccessibility of the texts' contents.
Orson Scott Card's Elements of Fiction Writing: Character and Viewpoint and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy are more accessible but not freely available nor available free as digital texts. They are the poetics texts best known overall by Hatrack members, though. I also think they cover mainly craft features and not much voice, audience appeal, or mechanical style.
Damon Knight's Creating Short Fiction: The Classic Guide to Writing Short Fiction covers the gamut by degrees, craft emphasis, some voice, little audience appeal, less yet mechanical style.
John Gardner's The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers covers a gamut, craft emphasis, stronger voice coverage, stronger though biased audience appeal coverage, very little mechanical style.
A survey of university writing program required reading lists, undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate, spans some seven hundred writing on writing titles, including style manuals and grammar handbooks. Aristotle's and Gardner's are on most of the lists but Card's and Knight's are on very few.
However, Card's, Knight's, and Gardner's texts are still under copyright that poses problems and challenges as well.
On top of accessibility issues is a general resistance by writers to study writing to begin with.
I wish a singular, brief, easily accessible, and pointed text existed that would provide ideal entree into the splendor of writing creatively and developing the skills thereof. Such a work would not only inspire writers, it would provide a stepping keystone toward realizing each's potentials.
I don't even have an area of study to offer that would be an ideal starting point for writers' entree into a study of writing. This craft is about the most disorganized pursuit I know of, largely emphasizing creativity at the expense of discipline.
Maybe starting with rhetoric's progymnasmata exercises, which our thirteen lines writing challenges and fragments emulate to a small but noteworthy degree; notably, the Fable, Narrative, Commonplace, and Impersonation from the fourteen progymnasmata exercises. However, the exercises are not an end in and of themselves nor do they in and of themselves foster learning of the principles of persuasive creative writing. For that study and exercise, a working facility with hundreds if not thousands of rhetorical figures is essential.
So this is a tall order, discussing a poetics text, best approached, I think, from an indirect approach. Toward that end, on one hand, a thirteen lines challenge series prompting emulation and imitation of published works, albeit, unfortunately, from the public domain so that no copyright infringement takes place, might be one approach. This is still a tall order though the easiest approach. Harder by far, on the other hand, is someone, me perhaps? composing a poetics text that simplifies and surveys a universal beginning course of creative writing study.
For the first, a thirteen lines challenge might prompt voice imitation. This is the Fable progymnasmata exercise. Take a fable, i.e., from Aesop's, Grimms', perhaps One Thousand and One Nights, Mother Goose, or similar self-contained short form work fragment in the public domain and imitate its narrative voice. Or rewrite a fable or other fragment so that it's expressed in direct discourse instead of indirect discourse, changing the narrative voice from narrator emphasis to character emphasis.
For the latter, a fundamental poetics text, I'm still stuck on where to begin by being overwhelmed by the infinite variety of writing principles to winnow down into a manageable and accessible number. I have a first principle from which to start; that is, the law of writing for audiences; that is, facilitate persuasive, appealing reading comprehension and ease. Where to take that law in a logical, accessible, and appealing direction has me stumped at the moment.
posted
Well, we've all suffered for our art. :-) But you bring up some issues that have been much on my mind.
I was at a chamber music concert recently, and during intermission two ladies sitting behind us had a loud conversation about the state of children's literature (which I heroically refrained from joining). One lady opined that the reason young people these days like dark stories like THE HUNGER GAMES is that they haven't experienced much pain and misfortune in their lives yet, so they're fascinated by these things.
Now it seems to me the biggest problem is that it doesn't explain how "these days" are different from the era in which H. Rider Haggard flourished. But I think *I* do have an inkling of what's going on. For Victorians, apart from an occasional trip to the theater consuming stories meant reading. For modern audiences the most common mode of story consumption is audiovisual -- tv, cinema and gaming. Even most writers I know seem to use TV and movies as their touchstones more than literature.
Words on the page are just the skeleton of the story experience; it takes the reader's mental participation to reconstruct the full experience. I think readers today are more accustomed to starting from sensory presentation and then reconstructing the emotional and intellectual dimensions of the story. It's not that they *can't* go the other way; it's just they're accustomed to sensory experience as the starting point.
Of course you can tell a sensory rich story in narratively distant omniscient third person, but the fashion these days if for close third person. I think this style of narration takes us from the cinematic to the hyper-cinematic. The writer doesn't just paint a tableau and leave it up to us to imagine ourselves as the protagonist; he puts us right inside the protag's skin, looking out of his eyes. We sometimes are informed the protag's emotions and attitudes, although in this style it's even better if we experience them spontaneously. Since misfortune is an important part of the storytelling toolbox, this hyper-cinematic mode of storytelling can produce a dark and gritty atmosphere.
I went through this with the opening to my WIP, DIGBY COLLIER. My intention was to use an old-school narrative voice, something resembling 1950s era light juvenile sci-fi -- told mainly from a moderate narrative distance with a highly informative and opinionated narrator abridging a lot of detail for you. But when I tested different openings with readers, they generally preferred "hotter" narration -- narration from deep inside the protagonist's experience.
The result of this hotter narrative voice was a positively dystopic atmosphere. In the classic narrative mode my narrator tells you that the planet Veskilos is dirty, impoverished and corrupt. In the hot narrative mode I can't hand you opinions and leave you to concoct your own sensory picture. Instead I put you in Digby's skin and make you feel the sulfur trioxide burn his eyes and lungs. A dirty cop even slaps Digby around! That's not 1950s at all!
But I think it's possible to go overboard with this. I find it wearisome to be trapped inside a character's sensations for tens of thousands of words. I believe that it's best to vary narrative distance, moving in closer as tension rises but also using cooler narration to abridge action that's not essential to your story. That's just a theory, but it seems to be borne out by most of the books in my library.
Look at the opening 13 to HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE. It's ice-cold -- just what you'd expect from a writer who idolizes E. Nesbit. But this is a writer who is uncommonly adept at putting detailed images into our heads. If you flip through the book, you see she moves the narrative camera in and out. Typically Rowling starts a chapter rather cool and distant. Then she closes the narrative distance as the tension in the chapter rises, although she'd not rigidly mechanical about that.
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posted
Oh, by the way; here's an interesting narrative voice exercise: rewrite the opening 13 lines of HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE to have a more contemporary, stylish voice.
posted
"Hyper-cinematic" runs contrary to my understanding of mimesis writing. Mimesis writing and reading still has to use imagination to bridge and fill in reader inferable gaps to a greater degree than film. Film portrays existents: characters and settings, in a fixed and more or less tangible form. Jeff Bridges portrays Rooster Cogburn different than John Wayne. Neither is identical to Charles Portis' written word portrait. I have a different sense of Cogburn's physical appearance and, consequently, also character traits from the novel than the films. I also perceive other characters, the settings, and events differently.
The meaning of the novel is in my estimation much deeper and also more accessible than the films. My imagination is fertilized more artfully from the written word version than the films.
I suggest a different term than "hyper-cinematic." One that appreciates written word's strengths that are film's shortcomings and vice versa. Yes, written word's closer narrative distance, deeper psychic distance, and yet intangible qualities as well, engaging audience imaginations on a deeper level, for one.
Film's other shortcomings include that film for all its devices and methods cannot stray far from story time, film's discourse and story time being about equal, more or less chrono-logical, meaning oriented to time's natural progress, whether linear timeline or nonlinear or otherwise not. Film does not suspend time's passage for very long. The Gary Cooper film High Noon follows Marshal Will Kane in real time more than less throughout at one extreme of film's fixed and parallel story and discourse time. Though another film may depict a longer passage of time taking place past the film's running time, say a decade, the story and discourse time passage of the film is more or less fixed in parallel to time elapsed on screen.
Story time for most practical purposes is the passage of time within a narrative's interior world. Discourse time is the passage of time to express the interior world action. Writing or reading that he drew a six-gun from his holster takes as much discourse time as it takes to perform the action in real time. Writing that Jordan ran the course in two hours condenses story time into a moment or two of discourse time.
Objects, settings, characters depicted in film are not as open to inference, interpretation, or individual subjectivity of written word as the automatic objectivity of film fosters. "This is a bouncy blue ball" in written word holds infinite possibilities that a film portrait qualifies and quantifies all but absolutely. Film portrays the bouncy blue ball as exactly how it is.
Though film methods depict thought in a variety of ways, character voiceover, narrator over voice, soliloquy scenes like Hamlet's graveyard speech, or by instead expressing thoughts aloud through the agencies of shared character conversation or uttered yet unremarked interjections and asides, or by emotional reaction shot clips, written word may directly or indirectly express thoughts from within their narrative interior world mental origins.
Whether a film has the agency of a narrator's expressed interests in a dramatic action does not translate as easily for audiences into voice distinctions as it does from written word. A seminal film that accomplishes this to a degree is the Spencer Tracy version of The Old Man and the Sea. Tracy reads a voiceover of the narrator's over voice parts, though in Santiago's voice, throughout the film. Santiago in effect narrates his own drama, an intent I believe of Hemingway's for the original. Though Santiago is not aware of all the action that the narrator is. The novella does not completely absent the narrator any more than the film solely represents Santiago's viewpoint. The film creates a few viewpoint glitches that are more or less artfully overcome by camera scene matching cuts, cuts between camera looking only at Santiago, looking only at scenery, and looking at both in varying proportions and from varying angles at once. Comparing the novel to the film is illustrative of the many shortcomings and strengths that distiguish either form from the other, and an effective example owing to the film's faithful, almost verbatim translation of the novella. An exercise in close comparison and contrast of the novella and film would give a writer a strong and clear appreciation of the narrator apsects and strengths and shortcomings of the narrator persona of narrative.
So what term might best describe this so-called hyper-cinematic quality anyway? The precise term's been around for just ages: mimesis.
This 1950's era light juvenile science fiction you speak of is for me a retroperspective of Golden Age science fiction. Asimov wrote quite a bit of it when he was an early adult. Clarke, too, and Heinlein.
Where an area of your departure from theirs is, is your concern about portraying a bleak setting and its influences on the overall emotional tenor of the piece. A strong narrator viewpoint won't in and of itself treat that concern. Childhood and young adulthood are times of awe and wonder, of exploring the world and as Meredith recently paraphrased: Finding one's place in the world and making one's place in the world. Not per se suffering the struggles of a dystopian society, but discovering child-like wonders and awes of wherever one might happen to be born or live. What's left may be no large matter and all but left out, left up to readers imaginations and inferences. Okay, Digby lived in a cruel and harsh community, empathy-worthy at least, but does he feel it's bleak or is it at times the best it's ever been? Let readers infer what they may about his home world's bleakness. He's not a children's charity posterchild for disease, famine, pestilence, or war, is he? Performing pathos for the camera by prompting from directors but more often contentedly playing in hazardous, filthy, and fetid community playgrounds.
Choosing a narrator viewpoint is not in and of itself a shortcoming nor a strength. Choosing from a variety of narrator features is a best practice. Like is the narrator detached? Objective or subjective? First, second, or third person? Selective access to character perceptions, conceptions, interests, and thoughts, ominscient for none, one, several, or all? Omnipresent, meaning selectively observing and reporting from anywhere or anywhen? Omnipotent, nudging characters into action or out of action or not omnipotent at all?
Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, 2004, has a distinctive narrator voice much like what I feel your intent is. A somewhat remote narrative distance from strong though artful narrator mediation.
Given these decisions, then is the narrator overt or covert? Is the narrator capable of expressing a character's unexpressable perceptions, conceptions, and interests? Or does the narrator have an agenda at odds with a character's? What else might support an overt narrator? Or is a covert narrator more appropriate to the drama?
In all, does the narrator mediate the action, reporting a slanted veiwpoint of this newsworthy dramatic event, like CNN, FoxNews, or MSNBC? Or is this an objective account, though mediated, like a biology textbook, say Beautiful Swimmers by William W. Warner, but dramatic? Or is this an account experienced at the moment it unfolds though with the narrator documenting the action as a witnessing scribe in lieu of a character? Or the one I favor, as experienced by the character with no overt narrator presence whatsoever.
Mimesis doesn't preclude any of the above. Though the more narrator mediation the more establishing a narrator idenity and interest in the drama is essential. Algis Budry's "The Stoker and the Stars," available at Project Gutenberg, is a model narrator story of that type; that is, a mediating narrator subjectively reporting the action to an implied news-viewing audience.
Even first person narration need not be invariably close. I find unvarying narrative distance not only tedious but artless. I see the artless variety in overmediated first-person a common shortcoming in struggling writer's writing. Mediation of the "I saw, watched, stood, sensed, waited, heard, smelled, tasted, felt, touched," etc. varieties. Bald third-person descriptions in first person are less mediated and about the right measure of sensory description to mediation. Narrator, character, bystander, readers, whomever can sense these external world, narrative interior world features as equally as any other and by default may be taken as a viewpoint character's perceptions. Just describe the sound or sensation, or report the dialogue as verbatim speech. Mediating that "I heard" So-and-so say no more hitting about a diety will be tolerated in school blunts the speech's impact through being removed by at least one degree of separation from the immediate moment, place, and situation of the speech.
Yes, spice in variety lies in all things: diction and syntax, character and narrator voices, narrative distance, psychic distance, person and tense, etc. Not for variety's sake solely, but for several rhetorical reasons, not least of which is "abridging" drama-less parts.
By the way, an imitation or emulation challenge as I know it would publish the original and the imitation side by side for comparison. I wouldn't publicly touch Rowling's property with a seventy-five year pole, the clock for which doesn't start until a creator dies. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, however, is in the public domain. Project Gutenberg's science fiction and fantasy bookshelves do have some more recent works that were overlooked when the time came to renew their registrations.
posted
Well, I suspect that "mimetic", while accurate, is too broad a term. In its broadest sense the term is completely orthogonal to the question of narrative distance.
Imagine a movie scene in which a posse is riding through Monument Valley. A movie can give you a ten-thousand foot shot of the riders. Or it can give you a front row seat from which to watch the action. It can even put you in a saddle riding along with the posse. What it can't do is get you inside the head of one of the riders the way close third person narration does.
In each narrative distance the story is still "mimetic" according to some dictionary definition of the term. Perhaps rather than hyper-cinematic, I should say "hyper-present".
I totally agree on varying narrative distance. I think opening chapters are a special place in the manuscript where you want to present people with narration which is engaging without being too mentally challenging, and my argument (or rather suspicion) is that hyper-present, sensory rich writing is easier for a lot of people to digest.
I also think that close third person has less narrative distance than first person, which is necessarily filtered through the narrator's persona.
As for Ms. Rowling, I understand the reluctance to bait the bull, but Ms. Rowling while aggressive in enforcing her IP rights hasn't been unreasonable. Her agents have not to my knowledge sent C&D letters to fan fic sites, unless the fan fic in question was pornographic. A 13 line literary exercise would be within the well-established bounds of fair use both by reasons of extent and non-commercial purpose.
That said, I have given thought to how such an exercise might be conducted, and I think it would be best to exchange submission by email, to avoid even the appearance of compromising the position of our hosts.
The problem with "Pride and Prejudice" for this exercise is that we need a text everyone is familiar with and presumably has read in the last twenty years or so.
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posted
Mimesis might be overlybroad for general sensibilities, being a mere shorthand term for a universe of possibilities, being showing. Mimesis is, however, distinctly appropos owing to its distinction from exegesis and diagesis, or telling. Film is almost purely mimesis, absenting voiceover and over voice and the like. Mimesis does have narrative distance implications, but not exclusively. Objective distance as in camera distance or viewpoint distance is another whole other principle. Though quite a few B-grade or worse films artlessly use mimesis for exegesis and diagesis purposes along the lines at times of "As You Know, Bob," dialogue. And first- and third-person camera objectives have managed to get inside viewpoint characters' heads using assorted cinematic techniques. Third-eye camera objective and underbreath verbally and vocally expressed thoughts no one else can hear, for example.
I will not participate in a use, exercise involving, or discussion of cited copyright protected material used without express permission or assigned licensing in a public venue. E-mail correspondence is still problematic for me. I simply have a rigid understanding of what constitutes a public Fair Use of a commercial creation that precludes me from doing so.
Nor is a copyrighted item necessary to an imitation or emulation exercise or challenge. If such a challenge requires that every participant work from the same item, same lines, I can think of many suitable narratives in the public domain. Most are hosted at Project Gutenberg.
For that matter, this isn't for me about entire works, only at most thirteen lines. Opening, middle, climax, denouement, ending, wherever, whenever, whatever. Nor per se about a specific passage from a specific work, short story, novella, novel, or installment saga. Contestant chooses whatever and posts original side by side with composed imitation or emulation. And here at Hatrack so that participants as well as the whole universe of Hatrack's audience may observe for everyone's benefits.
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Copyrighted material used--cited or quoted--in public discussion, except in very limited paraphrasing or fewer than a limited number of words total. Four or maybe as many as ten words from a text published for stated learning purposes but maybe two or four from a work of prose. I also make exceptions for works published under an open license, like Wikipedia. My policies follow those of libraries and copyshops that reproduce and distribute copied matter for audiences limited to less than ten patrons and writing workshop coursework texts with fewer than fifteen classmate participants.
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posted
Well, *ten* is by far the most most restrictive standard I've ever heard. For one thing that's far too short for critical purposes; 200-250 words in total are common in published critical essays. 13 lines works out to more like 150 words; I've routinely used that limit for my Writer's Book Reports.
Still, I have written to J.K. Rowling asking for permission, largely out of curiosity whether I'll get an answer.
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Well, we could ask OSC if we could use the first 13 lines of one of his books in the challenge.
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quote:Originally posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury: Well, we could ask OSC if we could use the first 13 lines of one of his books in the challenge.
Well, that's an idea. My reasons for choosing HARRY POTTER, though, is that it's written in an extremely un-fashionable style, distant third person omniscient with an opinionated (sarcastic, actually) narrator. It's no wonder it gave Harold Bloom apoplexy.
If you can think of an OSC book that's so counter-fashionable in style, I'd say tally-ho.
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quote:Originally posted by MattLeo: Well, *ten* is by far the most most restrictive standard I've ever heard. For one thing that's far too short for critical purposes; 200-250 words in total are common in published critical essays. 13 lines works out to more like 150 words; I've routinely used that limit for my Writer's Book Reports.
Still, I have written to J.K. Rowling asking for permission, largely out of curiosity whether I'll get an answer.
I haven't yet held myself out as a professional critic, for whom Fair Use is nonetheless not an automatic bar against costly litigation. However, copyright clearinghouse licensing for critical purposes is often free with comparatively easy red tape. For cost-free critical purposes licensing, word count limits average four hundred words per published work per essay. Many titles are available at clearinghouses and many are not. Depends on the copyright holder's expressed wishes.
For example, rightsholder of Rowling's Potter saga is represented in the U.S. by the Christopher Little Literary Agency, a U.S. subsidiary of parent Curtis Brown Literary Agency of Britain. Copyright clearinghouse data for Potter novels stipulates that reproduction content use licensing in print or electronic display is under rightsholder special permission terms and at a cost for purchase.
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quote:Originally posted by extrinsic: Orson Scott Card's Elements of Fiction Writing: Character and Viewpoint and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy are more accessible but not freely available nor available free as digital texts. They are the poetics texts best known overall by Hatrack members, though. I also think they cover mainly craft features and not much voice, audience appeal, or mechanical style.
Damon Knight's Creating Short Fiction: The Classic Guide to Writing Short Fiction covers the gamut by degrees, craft emphasis, some voice, little audience appeal, less yet mechanical style.
John Gardner's The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers covers a gamut, craft emphasis, stronger voice coverage, stronger though biased audience appeal coverage, very little mechanical style.
Thanks for short reviews here. I've read both of OSC's books and they were worth tracking down. (I got used copies from Amazon for reasonable prices.) I'll have to track down Gardner's book since it seems to hit the areas Card's didn't.
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As an exercise in rewriting to another voice, the first thing that came into my head was A Tale of Two Cities, immediately followed by two conflicting voices clamoring to be heard. Neither like anything I normally write.
(Gah, now there are three!! and I detest rap!!)
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