LIVE! #5
5 December 2018
Agenda
- Why We're Here / Roundtable Rules
- Introduction to Literary Forensics
- Group Discussion
- Further Study
Why We're Here
We writers want to improve our craft
by reading like a writer
We learn from each other
using Literary Forensics
Roundtable Rules
Always refer back to the book
Practice active listening & serendipity
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but not every conclusion
Always refer back to the book
Reading Teaches Writing
Meet today's author: Lisa Halliday
- Graduated from Harvard in 1998
- She worked at Wylie Agency as an Assistant Literary Agent
- Wylie represented Philip Roth
- Short story published in The Paris Review in 2005
- Left Wylie in 2006 to focus on fiction
- Won a 2017 Whiting Award for Fiction
- Currently a freelance editor and translator in Milan
What do you feel?
What in the book elicited that feeling?
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but every conclusion should be questioned
We practice serendipity
- nothing is too crazy
Always refer back to the book
What do you notice?
Two Alices
Some themes
- Epigraphs
- I - Folly: "We all live slapstick lives, under an inexplicable sentence of death . . ." - Martin Gardiner, The Annotated Alice
- II - Madness: "Our ideas about the war were the war" - Will Mackin, Kattekoppen, The New Yorker, March 11, 2013
- Asymmetries
- Personal Relationships
- Political
- Literary / Structural
- Perceptual
- Blurred boundaries between Fiction and Reality
- Perception - The Looking Glass
- Artistic Ability
- Swim Lanes
- How a Roman à Clef could go horribly wrong
- Humorless, Pretentious
- Stilted, unnatural dialog
- Unsubtile
- Un-lyrical, un-musical
Asymmetry - Stats
- Marketing: Literary, Coming of Age, Psychological
- Genre: Realistic Present-Day, Rounded-Binary Form
- Word count: 81,283
- Print Pages: 305
- Tense: Past
- POV: I-Alice; II-Amar; III-Transcript
- Publish date: February 6, 2018
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster
- Asymmetry
- Subject of 8-way auction for both Asymmetry and her 2nd novel
- Philip Roth called Asymmetry "a considerable achievement"
- Novel #2
- Set partly in Italy, it explores how conspiracy theories take hold
- Theme: blurred boundaries between fiction and reality
Rounded-Binary Form...(A-B-A)
Rounded Binary Form (A-B-A)
Word Cloud
