Five Ways to Fail at Design, from Harvard Business Review’s Failure Issue.
On suspense
The May/June issue of Writer’s Digest Magazine includes an article on “How To Build Suspense With Backstory,” by Romance writer Leigh Michaels. I liked this bit:
The suspense we’re discussing here doesn’t necessarily involve the characters being in peril; it’s created whenever there’s something the reader wants to know. Will Joe kiss Brenda? Will Sally give in to Brad’s demand that she work for him? Will Jared answer Katherine’s question or dodge it?
Whenever you cause readers to be curious about what comes next, you’re creating suspense. Suspense rises naturally from good writing—it’s not a spice to be added separately.
Plagiarism: "A Major Academic Mistake"
A local Christian college president has resigned after news that he plagiarized a chapter of his book. The Board of Directors did not ask him to step down. He took that on himself. Perhaps it’s an honorable move, but his explanation leaves me with doubt. He said he did not understand copyright laws at the time, and that it was “a major academic mistake.” The minister whose work was copied is quoted saying, “He told me that he had read my book in college, liked it, and was under the impression that I had passed away or that it was no longer in print when he used it.”
The former president said he tried to give proper credit to the minister in most recent editions by adding the minister’s photo and contact information to the front of the book. “There was not a cover up,” he said, “and I was planning on re-writing that section of the book anyway.”
How does any of this justify taking someone else’s published words as your own?
The Garrison Dam is in ND. Must be some kind of connection…
I’ve used the picture above before in this space. It’s me at Høstfest in Minot, North Dakota, a couple years back. If I read the news correctly, the spot where I’m sitting in this photo may be now, and almost certainly soon will be, under water.
I’m praying for the people of Minot, and solicit your prayers as well.
My friend Darwin Garrison has published a couple story-length e-books for Kindle, which you can download here for a buck. Skipping Stones is a science fiction tale of love, cyborgs, and rocket racing. Black Feather, Bright Heart is a fantasy about a woman with strange powers, fighting to protect a peaceful village.
They are stories with engaging plots and interesting characters. Darwin hasn’t perfected his full wordsmithing skills yet (at one point he slips on the old “flaunt vs. flout” banana peel), but the stories are definitely worth reading. Darwin is a Christian, but wisely leaves his theology implicit.
The Curious Poem of Rose Poe
The New Criterion published George Green’s poem, “Rose Poe.” I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s a vignette perhaps. Here’s the open:
Rose Poe was homeless after Richmond fell,
abandoned by the millionaire MacKenzies,
whose ward she’d been for over fifty years.
She spent her days down at the railroad depot
trying to sell some faded photographs
of her unhappy brother, Edgar Allan,
now long deceased, the author of “The Raven.”
…
Ray Bradbury on His Perspective and Critics
From The Paris Review interview last year with author Ray Bradbury:
Q: There was a time, though, wasn’t there, when you wanted recognition across the board from critics and intellectuals?
BRADBURY: Of course. But not anymore. If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me, I’d have killed myself. I think he was too hung up. I’m glad Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like me either. He had problems, terrible problems. He couldn’t see the world the way I see it. I suppose I’m too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past—a combination of both. But I don’t think I’m too overoptimistic. … It’s the terrible creative negativism, admired by New York critics, that caused [Vonnegut’s] celebrity. New Yorkers love to dupe themselves, as well as doom themselves. I haven’t had to live like that. I’m a California boy. I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.
Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana
I wouldn’t call it a suspenseful book. And yet Two Years Before the Mast kept me in suspense. I wouldn’t call it a book that’s hard to put down, and yet I read it in great chunks, reluctant to stop.
It’s an old book, and it’s written in the manner of an old book. And yet this reader felt the living presence of an intelligent, brave-hearted and sympathetic narrator at his elbow, one he is glad to have become acquainted with.
In 1834, Richard Henry Dana was a Harvard undergraduate. Stricken with the measles, he recovered with his sight damaged, unable to read much. He chose a radical form of therapy.
…a two or three year voyage, which I had undertaken from a determination to cure, if possible, by an entire change of life, and by a long absence from books and study, a weakness of the eyes, which had obliged me to give up my pursuits, and which no medical aid seemed likely to cure.
This was no pleasure cruise. “Before the mast” is a nautical term meaning the forecastle area, the place where common seamen bunked, where officers went seldom, and the captain almost never. Life before the mast meant constant labor, little sleep, unvaried food, and much danger. One crew member is lost overboard before the brig “Pilgrim” has rounded Cape Horn. Continue reading Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana
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Tuesday
Alex Mann submits a kind of college graduation short story, “Tuesday,” for our review. It leans on music to sort through the narrator’s emotions. Feel free to comment on it here.
Walker goes to church. Nation reels.
I went to church Sunday, for the first time in about a month. I’ve been out of town, for various reasons, several weekends in a row.
Frankly, I’d have been inclined to skip it, if I didn’t have absences to make up. I prefer to skip Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in church, for personal reasons. Please understand that I don’t object to the honoring of parents, just because I myself chose my mother poorly, and have not achieved fatherhood. Heaven preserve me from the kind of people who run around being all outraged all the time, because everything doesn’t include them.
But I prefer to let other people alone in their observances. I’d rather stay home in the bosom of my own bosom.
(Also, I think it would have been nice if Trinity Sunday had gotten at least equal billing. Just sayin’.)
But I went, and it was as uncomfortable as I feared. All the men were given numbered tickets as they came in, and then at a point in the service we were all asked to come forward. It wasn’t just fathers, but all men, so it was inclusive and all that. I stayed in my seat anyway, because I didn’t want to presume to patriarch status, whatever they said.
After congratulations and a prayer, they drew two ticket numbers and announced the winners of the Father’s Day drawing. I think the prizes were restaurant gift certificates.
In the cases of both winners, though, the claims came, not from the men up front, but from their wives back in the pews. Both winners had given the tickets to their wives to hold.
I think there’s some kind of profound lesson, or caution, there.
Don’t know what it is, though.
.