Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch is a post-modern, stream-of-conscious, choose your own adventure novel. Its loaded with meta text, extended allegories, and language experiments that, at once, are beautiful and frustrating. An unconventional book demands unconventional advice: The book is difficult because it has been written and structured to resist understanding. The book is difficult because the… Read More REACTIONS: HOPSCOTCH
TLDR: Real life and real people are ambiguous. If you want your writing to be realistic, be strategic about how you employ ambiguity. We want to breathe life onto the page, make the unreal seem real. In an effort to do so, we often rely on explicit descriptions, leaving no detail to be confused and… Read More BE AMBIGUOUS
Note: The first part can be found here In the world of Murakami, abstract connection and synchronicity are even present at the prose level. Take, for example, the following sentence from The Wind Up Bird Chronicle: “I felt a chill for no reason, then an unpleasant sensation as if something far away were moving slowly… Read More THE LANGUAGE OF DREAMS II
Rachel scavenges a post-apocalyptic city, rife with traps, mutated child tribes, and monstrous bears. She searches for food, water, and bio-tech. One day, she comes upon Borne, an enigmatic blob with a taste for lizards, and decides to raise him as her own. What is Borne? Where did he come from? Under the veneer of… Read More REACTIONS: BORNE
Two things. First, my friend Graeme Brown recently published a novella called the Pact. Brown is a prolific world builder and proponent of outlining. He’s taught me that a published book contains only a fraction of an authors efforts. Case in point, Brown keeps stacks of notes detailing every aspect of his built-world, which will never… Read More SPACE JOURNALISM
HUNTER JOURNAL 