Thomas Mann’s bizarre but mythic short story The Transposed Heads retells an Indian legend treating the intricately riddling questions of identity: who am I, who are you, who are we together? A young couple and a friend are on their way home (in more ways than one), and passing a temple in the countryside, one …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Say What You See
It can help us in our writing if we remember just how crazy a thing it is we’re trying to do. Imagine putting a word to every last thing we perceive, and then putting all those perceptions together into a self-reflecting kaleidoscope for someone else to look through. We witnessed something, and now it’s in …
Lovely Illogic
Here is the first of Writing Smartly’s new Thursday posts, very short selections from significant writers and thinkers to help keep keen perceptions and masterful language before us. *** This most beautiful passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Winter Dreams” defeats logic at its own game, for the noun surfeit means not only excess, …
Studying Studiously
The root of our word studious means zealous. To study something originally means to attend to it seriously, earnestly, devotedly in the belief that what we are trying to understand can open a vision otherwise closed off to us by a merely casual acquaintance with the subject. In its original connotation, whatever we study will …
Paragraphing Principles
What are we after when we want to write a well-crafted paragraph? Cynically we might answer, just to get it done!, but when we have something we really want to say to the world, we inevitably care about how well we say it: we want to be taken seriously and we don’t want to be …