Candide (1759) by Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet]
By keeping it to a much smaller scale, Voltaire is able to enforce magnetic and grandiose ideas in a line equivalent to a line in poetry.
Tag: advice on writing’
*** 100th Post *** WHY I WRITE: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction (1998) edited by Will Blythe
Writers write to feed that demon-babe who cries out from the misery the world has inflicted upon it. Hemingway and Orwell wanted to use their gifts to help change the world for the better. And the world, I believe, is glad they did.
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Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley
Many readers who cross the literary environs and pages of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (1818) will close the last pages of the book and consider Victor Frankenstein as one who is tragically flawed.
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Aspects of the Novel (1927) by E.M. Forster
Even though E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel was first written and used for lectures inside the classroom at Trinity College, Cambridge, I cannot help but to imagine sitting in a stuffy classroom, loosening my collar, briefly staring out the window onto a sunny spring day in 1927 only to be drawn back to a powerful sermon concerning the craft of writing, given by a professional who knew what he was talking about.
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Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy
In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy provides the reader with an overwhelming experience of cowboys roaming the range in search of scalps, either Mexican or American Indians.
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The Art of Fiction (1984) by John Gardner
In The Art of Fiction’s preface, Gardner writes: “About all that is required is that the would-be writer understand clearly what it is that he wants to become and what he must do to become it.”
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Master Class in Fiction Writing (2006) by Adam Sexton
Master Class in Fiction Writing (2006) by Adam Sexton is a useful tool and guide along the way of crafting memorable fiction.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez is a brilliant book by a true master, storyteller and magician. While on a family vacation in Acapulco, Gabriel García Márquez became struck with a vision of a story that, in two years, would become the sensational novel called One Hundred Years of Solitude.
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Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee
Not only has Coetzee brought David’s character to life and allowed to live his own life the way the character desires, the reader is simultaneously not repulsed but compelled to keep reading, keep digging, keep hoping like David that punishment will not go on forever.
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Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker
”The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.”
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Cormac McCarthy’s Never-Ending, Questionary Road (2014) by American Novelist CG FEWSTON
In most of Cormac McCarthy’s books there is usually a male character on some sort of quest.
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The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) by Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) by Joseph Campbell is the book that awakened in writers and storytellers in publishing and in screenwriting to the larger scope of mythology as metaphor and to the underlining structure of stories.
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Atonement (2001) by Ian McEwan
”At first, when she pushed open the door and stepped in, she saw nothing at all. The only light was from a single green-glass desk lamp which illuminated little more than the tooled leather surface on which it stood. When she took another few steps she saw them, dark shapes in the furthest corner. “
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Story (1997) by Robert McKee
Robert McKee is one of those rare gems that illuminate the craft of writing like none other.
