LIVE! #50
7 May 2023
Agenda
- Why We're Here
- Literary Forensics
- - What do I bring?
- - What do I feel?
- - What do I notice?
- - What do I study?
- Next Month's Reading & Study
Why We're Here
We Writers want to improve our craft
by Reading like a Writer
through Literary Forensics training
we learn from each other
Roundtable Rules
Always refer back to the book
We practice active listening & serendipity
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but not every conclusion
Always refer back to the book
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 I 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 I notice?
- • Language and Grammar
- • Context
- • Point of view
- • Character & character development
- • Pacing
- • Horizontal structure
- • Layering of themes
- • Overall effect
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)
Writers Who Read: Coming Up
- Summer Break -
September 3: The Passenger – Cormac McCarthy (USA, 2022)
October 1: Stella Maris – Cormac McCarthy (USA, 2022)
November 5: Avalon – Nell Zink (USA, 2022)
December 3: TBD