Cloud Atlas – a transmedial movie
Cloud Atlas, the film of the unfilmable novel, has had a belated UK release. With an epic cast including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent and High Grant, it’s ambitious...
The Booker Re-Run
In 1971 the Booker switched from being a retrospective of the previous year’s pile of letters to the cutting edge taking of the literary pulse it aspires to be. So,...
Breaking into Writing
How do you break into the literary world? In an interview with Wired, Paolo Bacigalupi, tells us it’s 85% graft, 5% inspiration, and 10% reading lots of fantasy and SF magazines… sort...
They’re Plotting Against Me!
People (tutors, writers, other students) have told me the same thing in different configurations: “Characters drive the narrative!” I nod. I agree. I go back to quietly and tightly plotting...
Holden Back the Years
I’m reading The Catcher in the Rye for the fifth time – following on from a week dipping into Borges’ short story collection Labyrinths, The contrast between these two experiences...
Notes on Narrative
Some notes on narrative that, in best Blue Peter tradition, I made earlier. 16 years earlier: Narratives are made up of units of information. In Roland Barthes’ ‘Introduction to the...
Bean (and other none comestible writing tools)
I recently reviewed Bean 2.4 – a brilliant, free and very lightweight Mac word processor – for Macworld. Here’s my redux version of that review: My quest for the...
Notes on Focalisation
Decided to do my first semester essay on variable, internal focalisation in Madame Bovary. Want to explore the structuralist roots of perspective as Genette’s Narrative Discourse, the set text,...
First Thoughts on Mrs Dalloway
Ploughing through the first pages of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, I’m reminded of several other artists, not all of them writers. The first is Jack Kerouac. The stream of consciousness...