Post by account_disabled on Dec 30, 2023 15:39:48 GMT 5.5
That reader's email also talked about this "problem": by reading various novels, he was convinced that everything has already been written and narrated and that new, original ideas no longer arise. I don't remember who said that everything has already been written, so refresh my memory if you know. Others say that after Homer's Odyssey everything has now been told. For others, however, who are more optimistic, the way in which you tell what has already been told is important, how you evolve or modify or personalize plots and ideas that have already been exploited. The Lord of the Rings can be summed up briefly like this: a handful of characters fight against those who want to control the world.
Well, a few days ago I read Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and that novel also boils down to a handful of characters fighting against those who want to control the world. But they are two completely different stories. Don't detective novels all tell the same story? There is a crime and an investigator must discover the murderer. Then compare Special Data Agatha Christie's detective stories with those of Andrea Camilleri (how curious: same initials), just to name two names at random. On the one hand I understand the frustration of not finding a novel that strikes us, that shocks us, that gets into our blood. At the beginning of the year I read O Lost by Thomas Wolfe and since then “Thomaswolfemania” kicked in: I know that it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to find a novel of that caliber. But I certainly can't stop reading. “Wolfe's sickness” – modeled on the famous Africa sickness – is an illness I have to live with.
Writing is also narrating what has already been narrated Perhaps too often we tend to confuse history with its structure , which is like confusing one building with another or even one person with another. Try to look at the skeletons of two people and they will seem identical, but if you then cover those skeletons with nerves, muscles, organs and skin, two completely different human beings emerge. When you draw a comic book character, you start - you should always start - from a sort of skeleton, which in drawing is only a surrogate, a series of lines to set its posture and movement. It doesn't matter whether you draw Tex Willer or Catwoman: the skeleton is the same for both. Then we move on to customize that skeleton, that anatomical structure, modeling the features of our character with the pencil, until we can finally distinguish a Tex or a Catwoman.
Well, a few days ago I read Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and that novel also boils down to a handful of characters fighting against those who want to control the world. But they are two completely different stories. Don't detective novels all tell the same story? There is a crime and an investigator must discover the murderer. Then compare Special Data Agatha Christie's detective stories with those of Andrea Camilleri (how curious: same initials), just to name two names at random. On the one hand I understand the frustration of not finding a novel that strikes us, that shocks us, that gets into our blood. At the beginning of the year I read O Lost by Thomas Wolfe and since then “Thomaswolfemania” kicked in: I know that it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to find a novel of that caliber. But I certainly can't stop reading. “Wolfe's sickness” – modeled on the famous Africa sickness – is an illness I have to live with.
Writing is also narrating what has already been narrated Perhaps too often we tend to confuse history with its structure , which is like confusing one building with another or even one person with another. Try to look at the skeletons of two people and they will seem identical, but if you then cover those skeletons with nerves, muscles, organs and skin, two completely different human beings emerge. When you draw a comic book character, you start - you should always start - from a sort of skeleton, which in drawing is only a surrogate, a series of lines to set its posture and movement. It doesn't matter whether you draw Tex Willer or Catwoman: the skeleton is the same for both. Then we move on to customize that skeleton, that anatomical structure, modeling the features of our character with the pencil, until we can finally distinguish a Tex or a Catwoman.