Torkulwoof †1/18/11
Us: So this blog was intended to deal with the question of how writing is made vivid, and then an extraterrestrial hijacked it—
Torkulweef: I’m not an extraterrestrial, I’m from another dementia.
Us: What we don’t understand is why we’re paying for this and you get to name it.
Torkulweef: It’s a simple democracy. I have ten personalities, one for each letter in my name; each gets a vote.
Us: Two of the letters are the same.
Torkulweef: Those are the twins.
Us: Anyway, a good place to start would be the post entitled “Writer’s Diction,” which deals with the most basic issue in the creation of lively writing. From there you will be encouraged to roam through a series of violent attacks on nonsensical beliefs about writing, entitled “When Writing Guides Go Bad.” When your brain is full, you can relax by visiting “Professor Sudo’s Questionable Quotations.” Here Nisemono Sudo is putting together a group of hitherto unknown famous quotations. We have been unable to stop him from doing this.
And finally, you can visit The Wordsmithy, where you are invited to submit a page of your writing. We will do our best to offer suggestions on our particular subject: how to keep it lively.
This site is new, however, even if it is expected to grow like Topsy if not Topsy-Turvy. Eventually we intend to get into issues whose relation to our subject might not be immediately obvious, such as how to give your story a proper ending instead of just a stopping. And finally we will introduce a writer who needs no introduction—a famous writer who understood these matters better than we do, and perhaps better than anyone, and wrote two novels in one. But one thing at a time.
For a story to have what we consider a proper ending, it is not enough for the “real-life” events to come to an end. Instead, some form of coherence has to be brought to the reader’s attention again. The most primitive form of this is used by an essayist who repeats his or her main [...]
To see imagery as mere ornament in a story is like seeing a man’s head as just a pedestal for his bonnet.
—William Shakespeare
The first thing to consider is the difference between the diction of writers and civilians. Writers use one set of words, civilians another. Most of us use words from what linguists refer to as “basic level.” We say, “I’m going to go get my car,” rather than “I’m going to go get my 2010 [...]
Torkulweef say: We offered to introduce Tiresias, but he refused, for no better reason than that he thought we would lie and say rude things about him. But people from our clan—and we’re from another dementia than the reader—are all either too stupid to get away with lies or too smart to tell them. Well, [...]
The problem is, he’s not a Democrat. Here in the U. S. of A., you can come up with 57 different ways of saying of saying that de Maupassant is an ass, and each is as good as any other.
—Mark Twain