So a while back I finished a book called Self-Help by Lorrie Moore. It’s taken me a while to gather my thoughts to write about it. The book is a collection of nine short stories about loss, love and family. All of the stories feature well written female characters and the stories themselves run the full range from funny to sad, but all of them are honest portrayals of people rather characters. Her backwards storytelling style was clever and well used.
Lorrie Moore
· Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it’s because I’m not a bitch. Maybe that’s why Miss Crawford always plays ladies – Bette Davis
· His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork – Mae West
· There’s a name for you ladies, but it isn’t used in high society, outside of a kennel – Joan Crawford in The Women
· Mr Maugham, I have two words left to say to you, and the second one is “off” – Tallulah Bankhead to Somerset Maugham ( after been turned down for one of his plays)
· If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised – Dorothy Parker
· Acting is the most minor of gifts. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four – Katharine Hepburn
· She’s the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong – Mae West
· She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B – Dorothy Parker on Katharine Hepburn’s acting abilities
· Dramatic art in her opinion is knowing how to fill a sweater – Bette Davis on Jayne Mansfield
From a great article in the Guardian called “Bring back the red-blooded bitch“
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Has anyone read A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong?
Apparently she makes the point that mythological gods in order to stay important to the everyday life of the believers, must have some impact on their lives. She points out that The Creation — after a certain period of time — really doesn’t have a lot to say to folks about how to live your life, and therefore The Creators often fade into the background on the mythological stage.
