9/13/2023 0 Comments Coherence writing exercise![]() (Collected in his newest book, Cleanness. “The Frog King” by Garth Greenwell, published in The New Yorker. Directed by Céline Sciamma, starring Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel. A gorgeous, moving, heartbreaking film, incredibly acted and beautifully shot. Thankfully, it’s made a quick jump to Hulu: if you’ve got a subscription, go watch this immediately. This is the best movie I’ve seen in the theater so far this year, and with theaters mostly closed, it’s also the last I’ll see on the big screen for a time. You are not Kung Fu Guy.” Could there be a clearer or more immediate statement of want and obstacle, placed right at the top of the first page? Written partly in script form, it begins: “Ever since you were a boy, you’ve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy. I’m right in the middle of reading Yu’s newest novel, a sharp satire of Hollywood and of race and expectations in America: like everything he writes, it’s formally inventive, laugh-out-loud funny and constantly moving. The way in which Yetu is expected to be the sole repository of her people’s memories-a task which perhaps asks too much of Yetu-is moving and interesting, and I’m looking forward to see what else Solomon does with the concept. I loved Solomon’s first novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, and I’ve been enjoying their new novella too: a kind of retelling of a song by the experimental rap group Clipping, it stars Yetu, the historian of a mermaid-like people who make up an underwater society descended from African slave women. 1750+ people got today’s newsletter, which means you’re already writing in good company: as we work on our crowds of characters this week, it might help to picture the many others writers working alongside us.īe safe this week, be kind to each other, and good luck with the exercise! Please join us, if you’d like!Īs always, if you write something you like using the exercise below, feel free to say so on Twitter ! You’re also welcome to share this prompt with others, if you’d like. I hosted a first event like this two weeks ago )with readings by Megan Giddings, Mary South, and Amber Sparks), and it was an absolute blast. ) We’ll begin at 5:30 PT with seven-minute readings by Charles Yu, Amina Cain, and Mary-Kim Arnold, followed by a “social hour” using Zoom’s breakout rooms feature. ![]() (The Zoom room requires you to RSVP in advance, but you can just show up for the Youtube channel. In case you too feel a need to gather, this Friday I’ll be hosting a second Online Literary Happy Hour, an attempt to build community and promote writers during this period of banned gatherings and cancelled book tours: the event will be hosted on Zoom, and also livestreamed at Youtube and Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, if you’d like to participate. Because of all this, I decided this month to make our exercise about inventing and employing large casts of named characters, even in short stories. Along the same lines, I’ve been thinking about what makes for a good character name, because I’ve been trying to write larger and larger casts of characters, which of course means constantly deciding on new names for people. ![]() In the last week, I’ve also gotten back to work on my novel-in-progress, which, it turns out, takes places almost entirely in crowded spaces-a fact that a month ago was utterly unremarkable but now seems as surprising as any of the more bizarre inventions I’ve written into the book. Perhaps because I’ve barely left my home in the past three weeks, I’ve recently been dreaming about crowds, about wanting to be with other people, lots of them, all of us safely packed in with other bodies, at a concert or a sporting event maybe I just being physically present with others, in my classroom or in the aisles of a bookstore or at the rail of a bar. Hello and welcome! I hope this newsletter finds you and your family and friends healthy and safe in these difficult times.
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