Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling
With sufficient care, that wheelbarrow full of things could become an entire system of meaning, saying truthful things about our world, some of which might have been impossible to say via a more conventionally realistic approach. That system would mean, not by the plausibility or acuity of its initial premise, but by the way it reacts to that premi
... See moreGeorge Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo
In times like these, we are all in the process of transformation, and so is the world around us. The Great Work, the magnum opus, is the work we are all engaged in, whether we know it or not. The Great Work is the reassembling of the tiny shards of light into which the universe was shattered at the Creation. Every story we tell, every poem we write... See more
Paul Kingsnorth • The Great Work: Alchemy and the Power of Words – Paul Kingsnorth
We understand a story’s meaning, in part, by tracking its causality, and a story’s power stems from our sense that its causality is truthful, which is to say, that its internal logic is solid.
George Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
We’re always asking, of a work we’re reading (even if it’s one of our own): “Is it story yet?” That’s the moment we’re seeking as we write. We’re revising and revising until we write the text up, so to speak, and it produces that “now it’s a story” feeling.