Category Archives: writing

Causation

By Hugo | Published: February 25, 2010
The following may seem obvious to you, my esteemed reader, but for myself I’ve enjoyed having these concepts laid out – articulated. For this reason I highly recommend The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative by H. Porter Abbott, which I’m paraphrasing: Post hoc ergo propter hoc A happens, then B happens. So A must cause B, right? No, not [...]
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Levels of Reality

By Hugo | Published: February 11, 2010
…literature does not recognise Reality as such, but only levels. I’ve also enjoyed Italo Calvino’s ‘The Uses of Literature’, in particular his essay ‘Levels of Reality in Literature’. It’s fools errand to try distill Calvino’s lucid argument into a blog post, but this is a scrapbook after all - so here is the vibe of it; Different levels of reality [...]
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Orchestration

By Hugo | Published: February 2, 2010
An old friend moved cross-country and left me with a bunch of film books that I’ve been flicking through recently. I really like this idea of orchestration from Lajos Egri’s ‘The Art of Dramatic Writing’; When you are ready to select characters for you play, be careful to orchestrate them right. If all the characters are the same [...]
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Mental Image

By Hugo | Published: January 20, 2010
I’ve been writing with Sam and we’re up to a sequence set in a forest. I don’t live in a forest, or even near a forest, so sometimes I forget what a forest looks like.  I wish I could spend a couple months trekking through the wilderness to address this problem. Photos are a more [...]
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