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Authors: William S. Burroughs
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Fire. Death was attributed to smoke inhalation. Why should this elderly woman thrust her death upon one? I doubt if she even made a good-looking corpse.
Does the writer play fair with the reader? There are rules to this game between reader and writer. Two books are on the list simply to illustrate the violation of the rules.
The Critical Threshold by Brian Stableford. Colonists stranded on a distant planet undergo an alteration through contact with a powerful hallucinogenic substance given off by mating butterflies. The change leaves them devoid of language and so altered that the human rescue party inspires in them horrors and something akin to nausea. A very interesting idea, but the writer couldn’t follow through. We never find out what this wondrous change consists of. We are led to expect something that is not forthcoming.
In The Great Sun Flower by Clifford Stone, the protagonist has a strange experience in Nice. He won’t talk about it. So this experience which leads to his madness and suicide by hanging is never revealed to the reader. It’s like a who-done-it where you don’t find out who done it or a monster movie where you never get to see the monster. It’s just the old ‘Nothing will ever bring me to reveal what I saw in that infamous crypt...’ (where the inventiveness of the writer lies buried).
What about the title? Does it arouse your interest? Does it evoke a picture in your mind? A good title can sell a mediocre book, a bad title can sink a good book. The Biological Time Bomb is a much more informative book than Future Shock. Future Shock became a best seller on the title, while The Biological Time Bomb sank into oblivion. There were two hundred suggested titles for Jaws.
Devise alternative endings: Happy endings like Papa used to make. Gatsby marries Daisy and here they are twenty years later living in the south of France a dreary empty snobbish couple. Daisy has become a secret drunk.
‘Looking for this, Daisy?’ He holds up a bottle of gin. Quarrelling, angling for invitations to the Duchess’s party.
Lord Jim lives on to become a living legend written up in all the Sunday Supplements, living in a 19th-century set that could fold tomorrow. Jim points sadly to graffiti scrawled on the wall of his compound: Honky Honk Home. He should be gone with the wild geese in the sick smell of morning. Often an early death is the kindest gift a writer can bestow on a beloved character, and Gatsby and Lord Jim both shimmer and glow from the love bestowed upon them by their creators.
You can move character and story to another time and place, always looking for the right slot where it can fit. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness becomes Apocalypse Now. In the early days of the Vietnam conflict CIA agents set up their Ops in remote outposts, requisitioned private armies, overawed the superstitious natives and achieved the status of white Gods. So the context of 19th-century colonialism was briefly duplicated. That is what writing is about: time travel. So I drafted Denton Welch to be the protagonist of a 19th-century western on which I was then working. *
In this novel Kim Carson is hiding out in a remote mountain valley with nothing to occupy his mind except an anthology of poetry, leather-bound with gilt edges and this leads us to an exercise I call intersection reading. Just where and under what circumstances did you read? What were you reading when the phone rang or some other interruption occurred? Note the exact place in your reading where this occurred. The point at which your stream of consciousness — and when you read of course you are simply borrowing the writer’s stream of it, being bored by your own, if indeed you have one, isn’t it all just bits and pieces, shreds and patches? Constantly being cut by seemingly random factors which on examination turn out to be highly significant and appropriate. For example, I am walking down a New York Street, Elizabeth Street come to think of it, just
Does the writer play fair with the reader? There are rules to this game between reader and writer. Two books are on the list simply to illustrate the violation of the rules.
The Critical Threshold by Brian Stableford. Colonists stranded on a distant planet undergo an alteration through contact with a powerful hallucinogenic substance given off by mating butterflies. The change leaves them devoid of language and so altered that the human rescue party inspires in them horrors and something akin to nausea. A very interesting idea, but the writer couldn’t follow through. We never find out what this wondrous change consists of. We are led to expect something that is not forthcoming.
In The Great Sun Flower by Clifford Stone, the protagonist has a strange experience in Nice. He won’t talk about it. So this experience which leads to his madness and suicide by hanging is never revealed to the reader. It’s like a who-done-it where you don’t find out who done it or a monster movie where you never get to see the monster. It’s just the old ‘Nothing will ever bring me to reveal what I saw in that infamous crypt...’ (where the inventiveness of the writer lies buried).
What about the title? Does it arouse your interest? Does it evoke a picture in your mind? A good title can sell a mediocre book, a bad title can sink a good book. The Biological Time Bomb is a much more informative book than Future Shock. Future Shock became a best seller on the title, while The Biological Time Bomb sank into oblivion. There were two hundred suggested titles for Jaws.
Devise alternative endings: Happy endings like Papa used to make. Gatsby marries Daisy and here they are twenty years later living in the south of France a dreary empty snobbish couple. Daisy has become a secret drunk.
‘Looking for this, Daisy?’ He holds up a bottle of gin. Quarrelling, angling for invitations to the Duchess’s party.
Lord Jim lives on to become a living legend written up in all the Sunday Supplements, living in a 19th-century set that could fold tomorrow. Jim points sadly to graffiti scrawled on the wall of his compound: Honky Honk Home. He should be gone with the wild geese in the sick smell of morning. Often an early death is the kindest gift a writer can bestow on a beloved character, and Gatsby and Lord Jim both shimmer and glow from the love bestowed upon them by their creators.
You can move character and story to another time and place, always looking for the right slot where it can fit. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness becomes Apocalypse Now. In the early days of the Vietnam conflict CIA agents set up their Ops in remote outposts, requisitioned private armies, overawed the superstitious natives and achieved the status of white Gods. So the context of 19th-century colonialism was briefly duplicated. That is what writing is about: time travel. So I drafted Denton Welch to be the protagonist of a 19th-century western on which I was then working. *
In this novel Kim Carson is hiding out in a remote mountain valley with nothing to occupy his mind except an anthology of poetry, leather-bound with gilt edges and this leads us to an exercise I call intersection reading. Just where and under what circumstances did you read? What were you reading when the phone rang or some other interruption occurred? Note the exact place in your reading where this occurred. The point at which your stream of consciousness — and when you read of course you are simply borrowing the writer’s stream of it, being bored by your own, if indeed you have one, isn’t it all just bits and pieces, shreds and patches? Constantly being cut by seemingly random factors which on examination turn out to be highly significant and appropriate. For example, I am walking down a New York Street, Elizabeth Street come to think of it, just
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