41 Places

William Shaw has embedded stories in their physical context.

41 Places is a series of narrative non-fiction stories printed onto the streets of Brighton in England. You can find them all using Google Maps.

With new printing techniques arriving by the day, you can now put words almost anywhere. 41 Places is a bold experiment at putting stories into the built environment – you could call it site-specific publishing. With 41 Places, a piece of writing becomes a crafted artefact, part of the landscape and architecture of the town. Changing the context of where you read something can dramatically affect how you read it. These are stories published in their own context.

 

Visual writing

“Translating my prose into pictures”

I decided to dive into the deep end, dispense with all authorial narration, and strip the story down to nothing but pictures and dialogue. Instead of paragraphs of prose I wrote panel-by-panel directorial descriptions for a hypothetical artist. The result was more like directing a movie in my head than writing a novel. (This may be why so many graphic novels, such as A History of Violence and The Road to Perdition, have been adapted into excellent films.) It was fun, but strange – and it became even stranger when the artist ceased to be hypothetical.

I can’t recall the name of the writer who began her career as a photographer writing descriptions of her pictures.

 

Anarchists exchange

From an exchange between anarchists in G.K. Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday, a nightmare:

“I have often wondered,” said the Marquis, taking a great bite out
of a slice of bread and jam, “whether it wouldn’t be better for me
to do it with a knife. Most of the best things have been brought
off with a knife. And it would be a new emotion to get a knife into
a French President and wriggle it round.”

“You are wrong,” said the Secretary, drawing his black brows
together. “The knife was merely the expression of the old personal
quarrel with a personal tyrant. Dynamite is not only our best tool,
but our best symbol. It is as perfect a symbol of us as is incense
of the prayers of the Christians. It expands; it only destroys
because it broadens; even so, thought only destroys because it
broadens. A man’s brain is a bomb,” he cried out, loosening
suddenly his strange passion and striking his own skull with
violence. “My brain feels like a bomb, night and day. It must
expand! It must expand! A man’s brain must expand, if it breaks up
the universe.”

“I don’t want the universe broken up just yet,” drawled the
Marquis. “I want to do a lot of beastly things before I die.
I thought of one yesterday in bed.”

“No, if the only end of the thing is nothing,” said Dr. Bull with
his sphinx-like smile, “it hardly seems worth doing.”

The old Professor was staring at the ceiling with dull eyes.

“Every man knows in his heart,” he said, “that nothing is worth
doing.”

 

Poem of the day

The Warning
by Robert Creeley

For love — I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.

Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.

 

Narrative patterns: The Hero’s Journey

Source: Archetypes on the Path

Interesting outline of a common narrative pattern: the hero’s journey.

 

Quote of the day

Source: Quote #216

…it is in these acts called trivialisites that the seeds of joy are for ever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness – calling their denial knowledge

George Eliot, in Middlemarch (chapter 42)

 

Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of good fiction writing

Source: blog.rightreading.com

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

 

Stories as finite-state machines

Source: http://interconnected.org/home/2007/12/28/wrapping_up_2007#fortyone

Websites can also be seen as finite-state machines that run on people. Successful websites must be well-designed machines that run on people, that don’t crash, don’t halt, and have the side-effect of bringing more people in. Websites that don’t do this will disappear.

Instead of a finite-state machine, think of a website as a flowchart of motivations. For every state the user is in, there are motivations: it’s fun; it’s the next action; it saves money; it’s intriguing; I’m in flow; I need to crop the photo and I remember there’s a tool to do it on that other page; it’s pretty.

Not only is this a novel way of looking at the design of Web sites but it would be interesting to consider the narrative as a finite-state machine.

What would this mean? How would a novel be structured as a finite-state machine? How can a narrative be a ‘flowchart of motivations’?

 

Quote of the day

From zenhabits.

Purity of mind and idleness are incompatible. – Mahatma Gandhi

 

The Speed of Joy

Originally written February 3, 2003

In the morning his daughter presented him with a photo.

He was newly wakened; she had been up for hours.
On mornings like these he likened waking to being born.
Vague memories of dreams he left like worlds behind him.
His eyes adjusted to the light; his mind unfocused.

“Do you remember this, Daddy?”

It was he
and his daughters on him
sliding down a snowbank.
No sleigh,
just him
as father and sleigh.

And instantly he felt joy,
was filled with joy,
became with their speed, by their speed, joy;
as matter approaching the speed of light becomes light.

And he saw her much younger than the young girl she was,
dressed as a star,
in a star-shaped snowsuit;
her head and limbs a five-pointed star
shaken by spasms of breath-stealing laughter.

And he cried
first from too much joy
then from too little.