The purpose of fiction is to affect rather than to convince the reader. Its object is to reach him through his senses rather than through his mind. The purpose of argumentation is to convince; the purpose of description is to present a picture; the purpose of exposition is to impart knowledge, ideas, facts: but the characteristic purpose of narrative in the fictional sense in which we are taking it here is to make the reader feel.
– Thomas H. Uzzell
Tag: knowledge
Quotable 356
It is not enough to know your craft – you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.
– Edouard Manet
Quotable 306
You don’t know what you’re going to write until you start, and you can’t start until you know.
– Tom Stoppard
Quotable 235
Deleting whole chapters might seem inefficient, but writing IS inefficient. I had to write chapter 21 first before I knew I didn’t need it.
– Adam Christopher
Fiction: Expectations
Artemis looked around the tight canyons of the great city. She was there for a change of pace. There were kinds of hunting here, although not the traditional sort she had always patronized.
She watched as a bus pulled up to its stop and several passengers exited. One man captured her attention, and she watched as he trudged down the sidewalk.
Artemis, goddess of the hunt, knew the terrible look of prey resigned to its fate, and that was the look on this man’s face. He was conventionally handsome and of average height. He wore a dull gray suit and a black tie. Only the despairing look in his eyes distinguished him from the crowd.
“Athena,” she called in her mind. “Do you have a moment?”
The other goddess appeared next to Artemis.
“Look at that man,” Artemis said, pointing down the street. “What has happened to him?”
Athena used her powers of knowledge and wisdom and divined the man’s history. She saw images…
Quotable 59
Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.
– John Adams
Quotable 38
No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.
– Confucius
Pen to Paper: Beneath Our Notice
I am not a nature lover. To me, one field with something growing in it looks very much like any other field with something growing in it, whether that’s cabbages, corn, or crabapples. I am well aware that my life is dependent on things growing in fields, but that doesn’t make them any more interesting. My philosophy is that if the Great Outdoors were truly so great, humanity would not have spent its entire existence trying to perfect the Great Indoors.
I am not good with tools. I can handle a screwdriver reasonably well, and Red Green has nothing on me in using the Handyman’s Secret Weapon: duct tape. But most other tools look like oddly shaped paperweights to me. And that’s where I prefer to leave them.
Finally, as H.L. Mencken put it so aptly, “I hate sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.”
Why am I telling you so much about what doesn’t interest me?
OT: WikiLeaks
I have just two quick things to say about WikiLeaks and its work, and this should be enough to ensure that someone in the national security bureaucracy ever after reads Catsignal (or makes Catsignal and its author suddenly disappear):
1) My parents taught me, so long ago, that if I would be ashamed if something I did or said were to become public knowledge, then the thing was shameful in the first place.
2) We are often urged to believe (contra good sense and the Fourth and Fifth amendments) that if we have done nothing wrong then we have nothing to hide. This must surely apply to the government itself as well as to its subjects.