Perhaps I should put together what I have Don and be done with it? I'm actually starting next week on the final draft. Sue is usually curled up with a book, but I've had a couple of years off making do with the net. I've read so much dross for academic reasons that I find myself bored very quickly. I quite like listening to the odd complex novel on radios 4 and 7 here, and old comedy shows (Dads' Army is being done on radio again). I sort of want to make sense of stuff in my own terms. I've got it whittled-down to three books. The amazing curse is I can't sit at the computer very long without pain, now I have the time! There's a lot in expecting readers to do work. At its worse, this leads to the kind of writing that is impenetrable on purpose and at the other end to the vapid whodunit. I've just read Robert Harris' 'The Ghost' (soon to be a Polanski film). The plot is super-thin. Basically, you're led to think Tony Blair was recruited by the CIA, bit it's really his wife, with a few hints he may have been shagging some blonde bit, with a few 'hits' for drama and the creation of standard paranoia. I'm always reminded, in writing, of that point in a seminar when it's obvious the slacker-students have never really read anything and certainly not the set material and I'm struggling to find ways to get them to talk about anything, and they are struggling to get me to waffle on so they can dream or whatever, with a few sort of paying attention to my hints they could start thinking for themselves. I used to do a stunt where I threw the textbook into the bin in the hope this might actually spur creativity or at least scare a few of them into thinking if all they were going to submit would be copies of that they might not get many marks from me. It became a bit like taking a dummy from a child too old for one and telling her we'd give it to the fairies. Sometimes I ask 'can anyone read this shit?' and admit I can't. We sort of get round to reading novels and sharing the experience, and this works for a few, but most just don't want to read or do anything beyond sticking in 5,000 words of copied dross. Of late, I have had some decent response to the idea of them submitting stuff that might get me to read (rather than 'mark') and I wonder how I might get that into a writing style of my own. New technology has given us blogs and one can imagine great collective work as a possibility. Writing can be so tedious that if the demand is 620 words a day to keep the advance coming, one stops at the limit in mid-sentence.
On 4 Mar, 14:45, Don Johnson <[email protected]> wrote: > Marcel is correct but so is Slip. Reading is fun. Almost all my > reading is done on the internet now so I don't read novels anymore. I > mean to again, of course, some day -but that day isn't yet here. When > that day comes I'm more likely to reread a favorite then actually > shell out 20 bucks for something new. That is unless Archy writes his > memoirs; then I'll buy something new. > > dj > > > > On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 8:02 PM, Molly <[email protected]> wrote: > > "If the novel goes the way of live theater – a medium appealing to > > only a small, relatively rarefied segment of the population – what, if > > anything, will be lost? What can a novel do for us that other art > > forms can’t?” > > >http://siobhancurious.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/encountering-the-other... > > > What do you think? > > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > > ""Minds Eye"" group. > > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > > [email protected]. > > For more options, visit this group > > athttp://groups.google.com/group/minds-eye?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/minds-eye?hl=en.
