October 2010
4 posts
5 tags
Can a man write from a woman's perspective?
In a recent article, Maryann Johanson asserts that,
throughout Western art, from the Renaissance painters through modern film, television, advertising, video-games, and comic books, there is an unspoken assumption underlying the vast majority of the work that the viewer/reader/consumer/player is male and heterosexual, because the creators have been and are, in the vast majority, male and...
2 tags
The tyranny of present tense
Philip Pullman1 believes that the usage of present-tense
narrative is increasing, and that the increase is an unfortunate
development. If I were to take a sample of my own work and the work
I’ve seen published in recent years, I would have to agree.
It is not surprising that a first-person, present-tense style is
increasingly common. The past decade has seen an explosion of Reality
TV...
1 tag
Movie review: How to train your dragon
Today, over lunch, I decided to preview “How to train your dragon” so that I could decide whether to watch it over the weekend. I usually preview a movie for ten or fifteen minutes randomly picking two or three scenes in a bid to get an impression of the overarching themes and delivery.
I ended up extending my lunch by one hour and watching the entire movie.
I think the movie is...
1 tag
How much of life do I need to experience in order...
I often worry that I haven’t lived enough and seen enough to be able to competently write a novel of appreciable depth. I also worry that I have lived too sheltered an existence to be able to understand the human condition and render it on paper with any degree of fidelity.
Then I remember that Jane Austen managed to write beautiful pieces of literature that were both inspired and...
