Toby Young criticizes a recent book-length critique of snark. Not The Snark, but being snarky, as in mean and harsh or witty, mean, and harsh. Apparently, the book on snark doesn’t correct for bias. “Thus when Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly attack Hillary Clinton, they are guilty of snark, but when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert attack George W. Bush they are appealing to civic virtue.”

Now, I’m feeling poetic. I must look up that Lewis Carroll poem:

The Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow.

“If only you’d spoken before!

It’s excessively awkward to mention it now,

With the Snark, so to speak, at the door! Continue reading Is It Related to Killer Tomatoes? →

S.D. Smith blogs about writing advice he heard from Orson Scott Card and whether that advice is universally applicable. How much, if any, should an author voice be heard, noticed, observed, seen, read into as it were. What I mean to say is what place has narration outside observations from the story’s characters?

Smith refers to P.G. Wodehouse as an author whose voice is heard loudly within his stories, but I’m not sure that’s quite right. I just read a short story, similar in style to many other short stories of his, in which a narrator is introduced to the reader and then he takes over the story completely. It was a story within a story. The Oldest Member of the Drones Club (or another one I didn’t notice) tells a motivational story to a young member who wants to quit playing golf. Wodehouse isn’t telling us the story so much as the Oldest Member is, so all of the narrative flourishes come from a character in the story, not really the author. That’s close to the way the Wooster and Jeeves stories are written too. Bertie Wooster is talking to us, not a background narrator.

In this way, I think Wodehouse comes close to following Card’s advice that a writer should remain invisible.

Dr. Goodword is talking about those words people make up within very specific context, not really for broad application by all English speakers–like the word cyberchondriac, intended to mean “a person who believes he is sick because his symptoms appear on a web page.”

“Now the real meaning of cyberchondriac should be ‘stomach governor,'” the doctor says, “for kybernan means ‘to govern’ in Greek while chondria is a Latin word meaning ‘stomach'” Apparently, a hypochondriac is so called because of the greek hupokhondria, which is the stomach or abdomen region and believed to be the “seat of melancholy.”

Who needs an MFA anyway? Alan Ackmann confesses:

It was easy, for me at least, to lose perspective on the real world—the world of non-writers, with their various struggles, joys, and fears—and this distance made it difficult to write about that world. Part of it was the fact that I started my program when I was twenty-two. My real life experience was limited, and it wasn’t getting wider in graduate school, and for a time this made me both self-conscious and defensive. The best writers in my program, I felt, were the ones with ample real-life experience on which to draw, and their stories seemed rich in character and emotional depth, their styles matched perfectly with their subjects. The weaker writers, by contrast, hid behind surface level stereotypes and artistic hijinks, cloaking simple thoughts in pretty words. And as much as I tried to be in the former category, I’m afraid I spent (and, regrettably, still spend) too much of my time in the latter.

How do you know you are a writer? #1 You can’t do anything else (particularly anything more profitable). Ian Fleming seems to have agreed.