Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 148
July 17, 2015
The Idea Factory Dept.
An earnest question: "What is your writing process like? That is, from "I have an idea!" to "Time to put this on Amazon!" how do your stories typically unfold?"
I said it deserved a more detailed answer, so here we are.
July 15, 2015
An Arrow In The Air Dept.
Earlier this week I completed the first end-to-end outline ofThe Palace of the Red Desert — not a complete outline, but the first one that covers all the plot territory from A to Z. The next move is to step through the document and flesh it out — go over it obsessively, see how things I wrote earlier need to be revised in the light of things I wrote later, add details I missed previously, make notes to myself about what to emphasize, and so on.
July 14, 2015
Unthink For Yourself Dept.
Form Vs Essence | Hardcore Zen
For thousands of years across a variety of cultures, people who meditate have tried to put their experiences into words that they hoped others who did not meditate would get. Because our entire way of understanding life, the universe, and everything is fundamentally wrong, these teachers were forced to speak in metaphors. But all of the best Buddhist teachers said thisquite explicitly. ...If we learn to read the words of ancient Buddhist teachers in that spirit...
July 10, 2015
Big Ticket Dept.
The Misplaced Nostalgia for Movies Like The Graduate - The New Yorker
... such apparently anodyne studio fare as todays plethora of superhero and comic-book movies are so often fascinatingly and intricately political, and why its worth paying attention to them and taking them seriously, despite the often-decried inanity of their subjects or sub-adult tenor of their themes. But this, too, involves looking at them with an eye that differs from the nostalgic exaltation of traditional Hollywood...
July 7, 2015
Roughly Re-Drafted Dept.
Holiday schedule and trying to disentangle the outline forPalace of the Red Desert (plus work, plus some distractions on Les Twittars) kept me away from these here pages for a few days. Of the aforementioned,Desert was the thorn in my side that was both the sharpest and most deeply piercing.
July 3, 2015
The Long Form Pt. 2 Dept.
In my last post about doing long-form vs. short-form work, I singled out a few reasons on my end why I picked the former over the latter, and what I felt it had done for me. Here, I'm going to talk about some of the things I ask myself that help me settle on the subject matter for a long-form story.
1. How rich is it?
By "rich" I mean this: How deeply can I dig into the idea? How much storytelling fuel does it provide me with?
Obviously this is going to vary widely depending on the person doi...
June 30, 2015
The Long Form Pt. 1 Dept.
A fellow author (and work comrade) noted that she was having trouble concentrating on a long-form piece of fiction for a workshop in the fall. Her forte has been short fiction, and she's gotten some of it published; my forte is long-form. Strangely, I find long-form work more comfortable than short-form, and this has baffled more than a few people: how is it that I can stick to something longer and finish it, but shorter work throws me off?
June 29, 2015
That's Entertain(t)ment! Dept.
Remember sitting at the lunch table in high school and feeling spitballs land on the back of your neck courtesy of the bullies one table over? Remember coming back to your locker and finding the handle jammed up with bubble gum? Or finding that someone had torn off the detachable hood from your jacket and left it floating in a toilet bowl? Or realizing that no matter what happened, none of the jerks who did those things habitually would ever have anything happen to them?
June 24, 2015
Holy Fools Dept.
More on willful stupidity:
Holy Ignorance by Garry Wills | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
This is what the French anthropologist Olivier Roy calls holy ignorance. It is not a failure of intelligence, but a proud refusal to know things tainted by the arrogance of inevitability. He writes: There is a close link between secularization and religious revivalism, which is not a reaction against secularization, but the product of it. Secularism engenders religion. The defenders of the lost...
June 23, 2015
Throw The Book At 'Em Dept.
When a Bookstore Closes, an Argument Ends - The New Yorker
The forces that brought La Hune down are, sadly and predictably, the same forces that destroyed Rizzoli, on 57th Street, or the old Books & Co., on Madison Avenue: the ruthless depredations of the Internet (Amazon is regarded warily in France, and pays a bookstore-protection tax, but it is there), alongside the transformation upward (or is it downward?) of the inner cores of big cities into tar pits for a mono-culture of luxury.
My...
