LIVE! #50
7 May 2023
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: Emily St. John Mandel
- Grew up in rural British Columbia, on Vancouver Island
- Was home schooled, then studied contemporary dance in Toronto
- Worked as an administrative assistant at a Manhattan law firm
- Sea of Tranquility is her sixth novel
- Has published 6 short stories and 24 essays
- Her 2014 pandemic novel, Station Eleven, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, The Toronto Book Award, was longlisted for Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award
- Station Eleven has been translated into 33 languages
- Mandel lives in Brooklyn with her daughter
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?
Writing Sea of Tranquility
- Began a few months before pandemic by playing with autofiction of her
experience with previous book tour - In February 2020 Mandel was fascinated with the "mass failure of imagination"
- Then the pandemic hit
- Desiring maximum escapism from her life, she wrote about time travel & moon colonies
- An ancestor of Mandel's did leave London under a cloud of scandal & was shipped off to Canada
- The 2020 characters are from Mandel's 5th novel, The Glass Hotel
- SciFi is Mandel's favorite genre, dating from her teenage years
- The challenge with time travel is how to avoid the infinite loop
- Mandel's Simulation Hypothesis: Could life be a simulation?
Stats & Background
- Marketing: Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction, Science Fiction Adventures, Literary Fiction,
Metaphysical & Visionary Fiction, Time Travel Science Fiction - Genre: Realistic Speculative Arch-Plot Long-Form
- Print Pages: 272; Word count: 48,882
- Reading Grade: 7th-8th; Avg. wds/sent.: 12.24
- Lexical Density: 48.16; Flesch Reading Ease: 70.22
- POV: Edwin, Mirella, Olive, Gaspery; Person: 3rd (except Bad Chickens & Anomaly: 1st); Tense: Past
- Publish date: April 5, 2022
- Publisher: Knopf, Random House
- Audio book narrs.: John Lee, Dylan Moore, Arthur Morey, Kirsten Potter (5 hours, 47 minutes)
- Recognition: One of the Best Books of 2022: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads
- Upon publication: More holds requests in public libraries than any other book
Writers Who Read: Up Next
June 4: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
– Gabrielle Zevin (USA, 2022)
Required reading: My Novel
Literary Forensics Reading Guide
Literary Forensics Masterclass
September 8: 8am - noon @ RMFW Gold Conference, Aurora, CO
& 1-hour workshop on Structure during conference (Sept 8-10)