September 2010
3 posts
2 tags
The novel that is going nowhere.
Learning to write a novel
The novel will not write itself. It would be nice if it could and
would. But it can’t and won’t. That is the sordid truth. My
counsellor instructs me that speaking or writing the facts of my chosen
life will somehow aid in the reconciliation of said realities. But at
the end of this paragraph, I feel exactly the same as I did when I
began it.
...
3 tags
Close writing demands close reading
When I read Faulkner, Roth and Nabokov one of the things that becomes
apparent is the huge gap, both intellectual and technical between
myself and those authors.
Their vocabulary seems an order of magnitude larger than mine, and I
notice the huge variety of words they draw upon in order to capture
every nuance of the phenomena they attempt to describe. Where I
would describe the impressions...
4 tags
Short story: Detective Hussein's Promotion
Below is a short story I wrote over a year ago after elections in Kenya led to a great deal of violence, and the death of an opposition politician that seemed typical of numerous untimely deaths of controversial politicians in the past.
Reading this last night, I realised just how far I have yet to go before the quality of my writing is something I can be proud of.
...
