“For the love of all things literary, please quit banning words like ‘said’ in your classrooms,” he howled. He demanded. He cackled. He barked. He spat. He bellowed.
He Pleaded
Tuesday New Release Day: Stone, Griffith, Banks, Zweig, O’Connor
Out this week: Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone; Hild by Nicola Griffith; A Permanent Member of the Family by Russell Banks; The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig; and A Prayer Journal by Flannery O’Connor. For more on these and other new releases, go read our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview.
Despicable Us
According to this week’s New York Magazine Approval Matrix, our own Kevin Hartnett’s article from two weeks ago is a highbrow yet despicable piece of writing. What makes it so despicable, you ask? Apparently they blame Professor Tom Ferraro’s adulatory passage on the The Godfather.
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“Best” and “Worst” Are Prominent
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Your Tacit Approval
“I hate to break it to you, folks, but RTs are implied endorsements. Forwarding an article by e-mail without explaining why you are passing it on implies that you agree with it (and that you are someone who likes to waste my time). RTing something without comment means the same thing.” Uh oh.
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Biography: The Story of Our Times
“There is one rule [to writing biography] that all who try their hand at it come to know: until the protagonist reveals his or her character—his or her inner self—what the biographer produces is less a life than a report, an autopsy rather than the record of a séance.” David Levering Lewis writes for The American Scholar about biography and writing “the lives of African-American figures, and [finding] in them the story of our times.”
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I took this up a couple years ago: http://ellenakins.com/stop-using-those-strange-dialogue-tags-she-chided-exclaimed-exhorted-quipped-chirped-opined/
Just as long as we aren’t forced to go as far as Elmore Leonard in his unjustly celebrated writing tips: “#3 Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.”