Writing Exercise!
Oct. 6th, 2011 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretHi guys... I'm experimenting with ideas for NaNoWriMo, my Pale Fire megafic. And yeah, by the way I finished Pale Fire last night and I'm about 65% convinced that writing Pale Fire fanfic for NaNo is actually going to be a rewarding and fruitful idea.
Pale Fire is a weird and confusing novel that I don't feel like I have a grasp on at all. I think the thing that's got me stumbling is that it's a parody of an academic critique of a poem, but if I were to find this book for real, if some real half-baked academic had really written Kinbote's criticism of John Shade's "Pale Fire", I would totally read it: Because it's so bad it's funny, I would say. I might stop and mull some of the theory of poetics, but ultimately I'd feel they were compromised by the critic's clear lunacy. So the question is kind of: Does the fact that it was intentional change anything? Does the fact that 'nix's friend Nabokov clearly knows that "Yankees Win On Chapman's Homer" is not a printer's error change the fact that Kinbote doesn't?
Basically, Nabokov breaks all kinds of critical theories about authorial intentionality here, and that's the only thing that emerges untainted from the glorious, hilarious mess.
But since I'm playing around in my head with writing styles and plot ideas, I'd like to ask you fine people to help me with a writing exercise by generating prompts.
Suggest a famous line from a book, any book. Suggest some sort of technical specialty of any sort (Bio-ethicist, basketweaver, I don't care).
I will write a footnote on that line in the voice of someone with that speciality
Pale Fire is a weird and confusing novel that I don't feel like I have a grasp on at all. I think the thing that's got me stumbling is that it's a parody of an academic critique of a poem, but if I were to find this book for real, if some real half-baked academic had really written Kinbote's criticism of John Shade's "Pale Fire", I would totally read it: Because it's so bad it's funny, I would say. I might stop and mull some of the theory of poetics, but ultimately I'd feel they were compromised by the critic's clear lunacy. So the question is kind of: Does the fact that it was intentional change anything? Does the fact that 'nix's friend Nabokov clearly knows that "Yankees Win On Chapman's Homer" is not a printer's error change the fact that Kinbote doesn't?
Basically, Nabokov breaks all kinds of critical theories about authorial intentionality here, and that's the only thing that emerges untainted from the glorious, hilarious mess.
But since I'm playing around in my head with writing styles and plot ideas, I'd like to ask you fine people to help me with a writing exercise by generating prompts.
Suggest a famous line from a book, any book. Suggest some sort of technical specialty of any sort (Bio-ethicist, basketweaver, I don't care).
I will write a footnote on that line in the voice of someone with that speciality
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-06 02:56 pm (UTC)The passage makes good use of the well-established literary convention of suggesting the vocal accentuation of a statement with a fully capitalized word or words. I have long observed that nothing so moves a fellow creature as a good, well-timed yell. It doesn't matter what you yell a lot of the time, as a colleague demonstrated wonderfully just last week when he charged into a scrum shouting "ROVER" at the top of his lungs. Everybody seemed to snap out of it when they heard that. There was some residual snarling and a bit of teeth-baring for a couple of minutes, but we managed to get everybody into a neutral corner to cool their heels. Yelling is good for the soul.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-06 03:41 pm (UTC)