Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 747
May 25, 2009
May 24, 2009
Latest adventures with my book club
I’m a member of a book club that I enjoy very much. We are currently reading Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago. It was chosen by my wife, Elysha, who views her opportunity to choose a book as an intense and weighty process that involves research, analysis, and great deliberation. She scans websites, reviews lists of popular book club novels, solicits recommendations, and gathers all the information possible before selecting a text.
As a result, she now finds herself saddled with a novel
May 22, 2009
Much improved
Just after complaining about my ability to write dialogue, I receive an email from a friend who just finished reading a draft of UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO.
Finished the book last week. It's a good story - well written and you're a very good dialogue writer. The dialog between Emma and Milo is excellent. Even though I recognized your own views in a lot of that dialog, I could still picture the conversation happening.
Nice to hear that my hard work may have paid off.
May 21, 2009
New Yorker insider
Dan Baum has been twittering about his brief career as a staff writer at the New Yorker, and it is fascinating for anyone interested in the literary world and learning more about how freelance writers earn a living. In addition to my job as an elementary school teacher, a mobile DJ, a secular minister, a life coach, and a novelist, it has been my dream, as it probably is for almost every writer, to write for New Yorker, despite Baum’s less than austere description of the job.
A couple years ago
May 19, 2009
Two. Period.
In the recent debate over how many spaces should come after a period, I unequivocally come down on the side of two. In the words of this blog’s author, “Taking the extra space away from a period strips it of its dignity.”
Unfortunately, it appears that there are forces mounting against this belief, including the Associated Press and the much despised MLA:
"Use a single space after the period at the end of a sentence." -- The Associated Press Stylebook
"Because it is increasingly common for pa
May 18, 2009
Bad dialogue
Each time I sit down in front of the laptop, one of my goals is to craft dialogue that is crisp, well paced, realistic and original.
A daunting task depending upon the day.
I’m much better at this than I used to be. The first draft of SOMETHING MISSING contained almost no dialogue, and though not intentional, I suspect that I was subconsciously drawn to a relatively isolated character like Martin out of fear of having to write any dialogue at all.
Eventually dialogue found its way into the bo
May 17, 2009
Abbreviated
Another amusing Twitter application:
Converting classic novels into 140 character tweets. From the Guardian comes an article about this new medium and this treatment of Pride and Prejudice, one of my wife’s favorite books:
Woman meets man called Darcy who seems horrible. He turns out to be nice really. They get together.
Or how about this Tweet of Ulysses:
Man walks around Dublin. We follow every minute detail of his day. He's probably overtweeting.
I thought I’d take a crack at a coupl
May 15, 2009
The good and the bad
I think it’s important for writers to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Awareness allows the writer to take advantage of his or her strengths while mitigating the weaknesses.
In this spirit, here are my three most prominent strengths and weaknesses as a writer, as I see it.
Unfortunately, it was much easier for me to come up with weaknesses than strengths.
Feel free to add or take away from either list if you have thoughts of your own. I’d be interested in hearing differing opinions
May 13, 2009
Fiction set in real life
I read a piece in The Guardian about Project Bookmark Canada, an organization that’s mission is to “place permanent markers displaying text from stories and poems in the locations where they take place.”
What a novel idea (pardon the pun).
Though I am a writer of fiction, my first two novels are set in the real world, with only minor geographic variances here and there for a variety of reasons. For example, I invented several streets in SOMETHING MISSING in order to avoid misidentifying any re
May 7, 2009
Old man
In her latest series of notes on UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO, Taryn indicated that I use the phrase old man quite a lot. Scoffing at the suggestion, I used the Find feature in Word to count the number of times I used this phrase in the book.
Forty-six times later, I was no longer scoffing.
