Read Like A Writer

There are two ways to learn how to write fiction: by reading it and by writing it. Yes, you can learn lots about writing stories in workshops, in writing classes and writing groups, at writers' conferences. You can learn technique and process by reading the dozens of books like this one on fiction writing and by reading articles in writers' magazines. But the best teachers of fiction are the great works of fiction themselves. You can learn more about the structure of a short story by reading Anton Chekhov's 'Heartache' than you can in a semester of Creative Writing 101. If you read like a writer, that is, which means you have to read everything twice, at least. When you read a story or novel the first time, just let it happen. Enjoy the journey. When you've finished, you know where the story took you, and now you can go back and reread, and this time notice how the writer reached that destination. Notice the choices he made at each chapter, each sentence, each word. (Every word is a choice.) You see now how the transitions work, how a character gets across a room. All this time you're learning. You loved the central character in the story, and now you can see how the writer presented the character and rendered her worthy of your love and attention. The first reading is creative—you collaborate with the writer in making the story. The second reading is critical.


John Dufresne, from his book, The Lie That Tells A Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction

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Showing posts with label Biography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Biography. Show all posts

Thursday, February 23, 2023

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) Biography

 


Virginia WOOLF
(1882-1941)


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Wikipedia article for Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was an English writer and essayist. We have most of her works at this site and they consistently rank as some of the most popular ebooks accessed. At the bottom of this page you will find a few snippets of her writing.

The article on Woolf at Wikipedia states that she "is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness, the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters, and the various possibilities of fractured narrative and chronology. In the words of E. M. Forster, she pushed the English language 'a little further against the dark,' and her literary achievements and creativity are influential even today."

Major Works of Virginia Woolf:
  • The Voyage Out (Novel--1915)
  • Night and Day (Novel--1919)
  • Monday or Tuesday (Short Stories--1921)
  • Jacob's Room (Novel--1922)
  • Mrs Dalloway (Novel--1925)
  • The Common Reader (Essays--1925)
  • To the Lighthouse (Novel--1927)
  • Orlando: A Biography (Novel--1928)
  • A Room of One's Own (Essay--1929)
  • The Waves (Novel--1931)
  • Flush: A Biography (1933)
  • The Common Reader Second Series (Essays--1935)
  • The Years (Novel 1937)
  • Three Guineas (Essay--1938)
  • Between the Acts (Novel 1941)
  • Collected Essays
  • Collected Short Stories

Contents of Virginia Woolf's Short Story and Essay Collections

ESSAYS SHORT STORIES
   
THE COMMON READER (1925)

The Common Reader
The Pastors and Chaucer
On not knowing Greek
The Elizabethan Lumber Room
Notes on an Elizabethan Play
Montaigne
The Duchess of Newcastle
Rambling round Evelyn
Defoe
Addison
Lives of the Obscure--Taylors and Edgeworths
Lives of the Obscure--Laetitia Pilkington
Jane Austin
Modern Fiction
Jayne Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights'
George Eliot
The Russian Point of View
Outlines--Miss Mitford
Outlines--Bentley
Outlines--Lady Dorothy Nevill
Outlines--Archbishop Thomson
The Patron and the Crocus
The Modern Essay
Joseph Conrad
How it strikes a Contemporary

THE COMMON READER: SECOND SERIES (1932)

The Strange Elizabethans
Donne After Three Centuries
"The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia"
"Robinson Crusoe"
Dorothy Osborne's "Letters"
Swift's "Journal of Stella"
The "Sentimental Journey"
Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son
Two Parsons: James Woodforde; John Skinner
Dr. Burney's Evening Party
Jack Mytton
De Quincey's Autobiography
Four Figures: Cowper and Lady Austen; Beau    Brummell; Mary Wollstonecraft; Dorothy Wordsworth
William Hazlitt
Geraldine and Jane
"Aurora Leigh"
The Niece of an Earl
George Gissing
The Novels of George Meredith
"I am Christina Rossetti"
The Novels of Thomas Hardy
How Should One Read a Book?

THE DEATH OF THE MOTH AND OTHER ESSAYS (1942)

The Death Of The Moth
Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car
Three Pictures
Old Mrs. Grey
Street Haunting: A London Adventure
"Twelfth Night" at the Old Vic
Madame de Sévigné
The Humane Art
Two Antiquaries: Walpole and Cole
The Rev. William Cole: A Letter
The Historian and "The Gibbon"
Reflections at Sheffield Place
The Man at the Gate
Sara Coleridge
"Not One Of Us"
Henry James
1. Within the Rim
2. The Old Order
3. The Letters of Henry James
George Moore
The Novels of E. M. Forster
Middlebrow
The Art of Biography
Craftsmanship
A Letter to a Young Poet
Why?
Professions for Women
Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid

THE CAPTAIN'S DEATH BED AND OTHER ESSAYS (1950)

Editorial Note
Oliver Goldsmith
White's Selborne
Life Itself
Crabbe
Selina Trimmer
The Captain's Death Bed
Ruskin
The Novels Of Turgenev
Half Of Thomas Hardy
Leslie Stephen
Mr. Conrad: A Conversation
The Cosmos
Walter Raleigh
Mr. Bennett And Mrs. Brown
All About Books
Reviewing
Modern Letters
Reading
The Cinema
Walter Sickert
Flying Over London
The Sun And The Fish
Gas
Thunder At Wembley
Memories Of A Working Women's Guild

MONDAY OR TUESDAY (1919)

A Haunted House
A Society
Monday or Tuesday
An Unwritten Novel
The String Quartet
Blue & Green
Kew Gardens
The Mark on the Wall

A HAUNTED HOUSE (1944)

A Haunted House
Monday or Tuesday
An Unwritten Novel
The String Quartet
Kew Gardens
The Mark on the Wall
The New Dress
The Shooting Party
Lappin and Lappinova
Solid Objects
The Lady in the Looking-Glass
The Duchess and the Jeweller
Moments of Being. "Slater's Pins have no Points"
The Man who Loved his Kind
The Searchlight
The Legacy
Together and Apart
A Summing Up

THE COMPLETE SHORTER FICTION (1985)

Phyllis and Rosamond
The Mysterious Case of Miss V.
The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn
Memoirs of a Novelist
The Mark on the Wall
Kew Gardens
The Evening Party
Solid Objects
Sympathy
An Unwritten Novel
A Haunted House
 A Society
Monday or Tuesday
The String Quartet
Blue & Green
A Woman's College from Outside
In the Orchard
Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street
Nurse Lugton's Curtain
The Widow and the Parrot: A True Story
The New Dress
Happiness
Ancestors
The Introduction
Together and Apart
The Man who Loved his Kind
A Simple Melody
A Summing Up
Moments of Being. "Slater's Pins have no Points"
The Lady in the Looking-Glass
The Fascination of the Pool
Three Pictures
Scenes from the Life of a British Naval Officer
Miss Pryme
Ode Written Partly in Prose
Portraits
Uncle Vanya
The Duchess and the Jeweller
The Shooting Party
Lappin and Lappinova
The Searchlight
Gypsy, the Mongrel
The Legacy
The Symbol
The Watering Place

































 

Extracts from Virginia Woolf's writing

Thus, glancing round the bookshop, we make other such sudden capricious friendships with the unknown and the vanished whose only record is, for example, this little book of poems, so fairly printed, so finely engraved, too, with a portrait of the author. For he was a poet and drowned untimely, and his verse, mild as it is and formal and sententious, sends forth still a frail fluty sound like that of a piano organ played in some back street resignedly by an old Italian organ-grinder in a corduroy jacket. There are travellers, too, row upon row of them, still testifying, indomitable spinsters that they were, to the discomforts that they endured and the sunsets they admired in Greece when Queen Victoria was a girl. A tour in Cornwall with a visit to the tin mines was thought worthy of voluminous record. People went slowly up the Rhine and did portraits of each other in Indian ink, sitting reading on deck beside a coil of rope; they measured the pyramids; were lost to civilization for years; converted negroes in pestilential swamps. This packing up and going off, exploring deserts and catching fevers, settling in India for a lifetime, penetrating even to China and then returning to lead a parochial life at Edmonton, tumbles and tosses upon the dusty floor like an uneasy sea, so restless the English are, with the waves at their very door. The waters of travel and adventure seem to break upon little islands of serious effort and lifelong industry stood in jagged column upon the floor. In these piles of puce-bound volumes with gilt monograms on the back, thoughtful clergymen expound the gospels; scholars are to be heard with their hammers and their chisels chipping clear the ancient texts of Euripides and Aeschylus. Thinking, annotating, expounding goes on at a prodigious rate all around us and over everything, like a punctual, everlasting tide, washes the ancient sea of fiction. Innumerable volumes tell how Arthur loved Laura and they were separated and they were unhappy and then they met and they were happy ever after, as was the way when Victoria ruled these islands.

From "Street Haunting: A London Adventure"


At the thought of all those women working year after year and finding it hard to get two thousand pounds together, and as much as they could do to get thirty thousand pounds, we burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex. What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses? Looking in at shop windows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte Carlo? There were some photographs on the mantelpiece. Mary's mother--if that was her picture--may have been a wastrel in her spare time (she had thirteen children by a minister of the church), but if so her gay and dissipated life had left too few traces of its pleasures on her face. She was a homely body; an old lady in a plaid shawl which was fastened by a large cameo; and she sat in a basket-chair, encouraging a spaniel to look at the camera, with the amused, yet strained expression of one who is sure that the dog will move directly the bulb is pressed. Now if she had gone into business; had become a manufacturer of artificial silk or a magnate on the Stock Exchange; if she had left two or three hundred thousand pounds to Fernham, we could have been sitting at our ease to-night and the subject of our talk might have been archaeology, botany, anthropology, physics, the nature of the atom, mathematics, astronomy, relativity, geography. If only Mrs Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex, we might have dined very tolerably up here alone off a bird and a bottle of wine; we might have looked forward without undue confidence to a pleasant and honourable lifetime spent in the shelter of one of the liberally endowed professions. We might have been exploring or writing; mooning about the venerable places of the earth; sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or. going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a little poetry. Only, if Mrs Seton and her like had gone into business at the age of fifteen, there would have been--that was the snag in the argument--no Mary. What, I asked, did Mary think of t hat? There between the curtains was the October night, calm and lovely, with a star or two caught in the yellowing trees. Was she ready to resign her share of it and her memories (for they had been a happy family, though a large one) of games and quarrels up in Scotland, which she is never tired of praising for the fineness of its air and the quality of its cakes, in order that Fernham might have been endowed with fifty thousand pounds or so by a stroke of the pen? For, to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children--no human being could stand it. Consider the facts, we said. First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one. People say, too, that human nature takes its shape in the years between one and five. If Mrs Seton, I said, had been making money, what sort of memories would you have had of games and quarrels? What would you have known of Scotland, and its fine air and cakes and all the rest of it? But it is useless to ask these questions, because you would never have come into existence at all. Moreover, it is equally useless to ask what might have happened if Mrs Seton and her mother and her mother before her had amassed great wealth and laid it under the foundations of college and library, because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money they earned. It is only for the last forty-eight years that Mrs Seton has had a penny of her own. For all the centuries before that it would have been her husband's property--a thought which, perhaps, may have had its share in keeping Mrs Seton and her mothers off the Stock Exchange. Every penny I earn, they may have said, will be taken from me and disposed of according to my husband's wisdom--perhaps to found a scholarship or to endow a fellowship in Balliol or Kings, so that to earn money, even if I could earn money, is not a matter that interests me very greatly. I had better leave it to my husband.

From "A Room of One's Own"


But these contributions to the dangerous and fascinating subject of the psychology of the other sex--it is one, I hope, that you will investigate when you have five hundred a year of your own--were interrupted by the necessity of paying the bill. It came to five shillings and ninepence. I gave the waiter a ten-shilling note and he went to bring me change. There was another ten-shilling note in my purse; I noticed it, because it is a fact that still takes my breath away the power of my purse to breed ten-shilling notes automatically. I open it and there they are. Society gives me chicken and coffee, bed and lodging, in return for a certain number of pieces of paper which were left me by an aunt, for no other reason than that I share her name.

 From "A Room of One's Own"

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Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Ambrose Bierce Biography

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born on June 24, 1842 in the settlement of Horse Cave, Ohio. He died November 30, 1913 in Mexico.  He was the tenth of thirteen children born to Marcus Aurelius and Laura Sherwood Bierce.

The Bierces moved to Indiana during Ambrose's childhood, settling in Warsaw and then Elkhart.

Bierce benefited a great deal from his father's farmhouse library, and late in life declared it to be his most important early educational influence.

Another early influence on Bierce was his uncle, General Lucius Verus Bierce of Akron, Ohio. Ambrose observed carefully the man's idealism, oratorical skills, public service, and social activism. All his life, Bierce held up the career of his uncle as a model for his own.

When about seventeen, Bierce enrolled at the Kentucky Military Institute. There he learned about military subjects and appears to have studied topographical engineering. He adapted well to military life and discipline.

He left the Institute on the eve of the Civil War, returning to Indiana in 1860.

Known for his satirical wit and sardonic view of human nature, Ambrose Bierce earned the nickname "Bitter Bierce." His mocking cynicism is on full display in The Devil's Dictionary, a work that originally appeared under the title The Cynic’s Word Book. This humorous and often strikingly insightful book is always worth a casual visit as he takes his turn handing out striking proclamations about human nature and daily life.

As a short story writer, Bierce gave us many treasures. His most famous and widely read short story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is brilliantly written. One doesn’t need an expert to discern that, but for good measure Kurt Vonnegut considered An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge to be the greatest American short story and a work of flawless American genius. Though more predictable, A Horseman in the Sky is also stamped with literary genius.

In 1913, during the Mexican Revolutionary War, Bierce traveled to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the conflict. He disappeared without a trace while traveling with rebel troops. Prior to his mysterious disappearance, Bierce served in the Civil War in the Union's 9th Indiana Regiment, gaining newspaper attention during the "first battle" of Philippi for his daring rescue, under fire, of a gravely wounded comrade at the Battle of Rich Mountain. He suffered a head injury in 1864 at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, taking a furlow, then later leaving the Army. He was commissioned Lieutenant for the Army in San Francisco, where he remained for many years, eventually becoming famous as a contributor and editor for a number of local newspapers and periodicals.

Bierce became one of the most influential writers on the West Coast, working for Hearst's The San Francisco Examiner, starting in 1887 when he published his column called "The Prattle," a searing criticism that embroiled the newspaper in several controversies that Hearst had to smooth over.

Bierce's short stories are based on the terrible things he had seen during war time, particularly The Boarded Window, Killed at Resaca, and Chickamauga.

Along with war and ghost stories, Bierce published several volumes of poetry. Favoring the ironic style of the grotesque, Fantastic Fables was followed by his more famous work, drawn from occasional newspaper items, The Devil's Dictionary, a satirical book of definitions published in 1906. This was the entire seventh volume of his twelve volume set, Collected Works, published in 1909.

At least three films have been made based on An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. The Bridge, a silent film in 1929, and two versions of Twilight Zone episodes in 1964, one in French, the other American. Most recently, the ABC television series Lost episode entitled "The Long Con" is based on this Bierce story.

We hope you will enjoy his well-known works and also venture deeper into his collection to uncover your own favorites.

Friday, December 11, 2015

Kate Chopin Biography

Word Count:  610

Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri on February 8, 1850, is considered one of the first feminist authors of the 20th century. She was following a rather conventional path as a housewife until an unfortunate tragedy -- the untimely death of her husband -- altered the course of her life. She was a talented and prolific short story writer but is best known for her novel The Awakening (1899), a hauntingly prescient tale of a woman unfulfilled by the mundane yet highly celebrated "feminine role," and her painful realization that the constraints of her gender blocked her ability to seek a more fulfilling life.

Chopin placed most of her stories in north central Louisiana, many in Natchitoches, and she published two significant short story collections; Bayou Folk in 1894, and then A Night in Acadie in 1897. The reader will find gems in both collections.

Some argue that modern feminism was borne on her pages, and one needs to look no further than her 1894 short story The Story of an Hour to support the claim. The reader should note the relationship of the leading figure in that story to the circumstances of Kate Chopin’s own life, where the death of her own husband started a process that would ultimately push her beyond the roles of wife and mother of six and on to the life of an artist. After The Story of an Hour a reader would do well to balance the scale and turn their attention to Regret -- a short story blessed with love and borne from a mother's heart.

Desiree's Baby (1893), and The Storm (1898), which is a sequel to her story At the 'Cadian Ball (1892), are also amongst her most celebrated short stories.

Chopin's writing career began after her husband died on their Louisiana plantation in 1882 and she was struggling financially. Her mother convinced Kate to move back to St. Louis, but died shortly thereafter leaving her alone. Now Chopin, suffering from the loss of her husband and mother, was advised by her obstetrician and family friend to fight her state of depression by taking up writing as a source of therapeutic healing, a way to focus her energy and provide Chopin with a source of income. She took the advice to heart.

By the early 1890s, Kate Chopin was writing short stories, articles, and translations which appeared in periodicals and literary magazines regionally based in St. Louis -- she was perceived as a "local color" writer, but her literary qualities were discounted. Her novel The Awakening, (1899) was considered too far ahead of its time and Chopin was discouraged by the literary criticism and that she had not been accepted as an author, so she turned to short story writing almost exclusively thereafter.

Chopin embraced a number of writing styles, taking into account her ancestry of Irish and French descent, and her years with Creole and Cajun influences in Louisiana. Slavery and women's rights were realities that she incorporated in many of her stories and sketches, portraying women in a less than conventional manner, with individual wants and needs. Perhaps in many ways autobiographical, her exploration of women's independence was not celebrated until many years later. Chopin was in many ways, a woman before her time.

Readers interested the feminist aspects of Kate Chopin's works will also wish to investigate plays and short stories from Susan Glaspell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's semi-autobiographical sketch The Yellow Wallpaper.

But it would be a grave mistake to dismiss Chopin as "a feminist" writer. She was a first-class writer and her ability to raise life from a blank page knows few equals.