September 16, 2019
What Makes a Character Human?
It’s been almost twenty years ago now since James Wood penned (metaphorically speaking, of course, since I’m sure he used a computer) his famous critique of a genre of literary […]
March 5, 2019
On Novels that Span a Lifetime
There’s a famous theory (attributed to Aristotle, though in reality the result of misinterpretations of his work made by Renaissance humanists) that a good tragedy should follow the three unities, […]
October 29, 2013
The Twenty-Year Rule
Just as there is a sharp division between a 19th century Yeats (the “Celtic Twilight” material) and a deliberately developed, 20th century Yeats (the “Byzantine” Yeats of the more […]
August 19, 2013
The Projection of Personality
The tightness or rightness of sentences, images, metaphors, the snapping-together of word and word, phrase and phrase—in other words, the stylistic elements writers spend years perfecting—are useless without the supreme […]
November 8, 2012
Entertainment and Excess: The Great Literary Audiences
At the most basic level, what’s success for a biological organism is success for a literary one—whatever survives, wins. A sequence of words has an effect on a given […]
July 2, 2012
The Jack of All Modes
When you publish a novel, there’s often a flurry of interviews over the ensuing months. The interviewers repeat questions independently of one another. It’s an interesting indicator of what people […]
April 2, 2012
The Enduring Appeal of Jules Verne
If all Verne had done was predict the future, he would excite my admiration, not my love. How perspicacious the man was! Really ahead of his time! And that’s where […]