-
John Fowles: Mischanneling
John Fowles on the strengths of the novel vs. the screenplay: Why have I got it in for the novel? […] All the purely visual and aural sequences in the modern novel are a bore, both to read and to write. People’s physical appearance, their movements, their sounds, places, moods of places – the camera […]
-
John Fowles: Choosing to Be a Writer
It would, I believe, be disingenuous to hold a class without offering the unsuited persons in the assembly a chance to leave the room. To be a writer – that is, someone for whom writing is closer to being a aspect of being rather than a particular activity, demands certain distinctions. There are many personal […]
-
John Fowles: Writers are not Doers?
At the heart of my studies (and my teaching) is the question what is a writer? Certainly, it is not someone who simply writes things down; and nor is it necessarily someone who writes a text. An artist is not someone who daubs canvas with paint any further than frequent flyer is an aerospace engineer. […]
-
Visualising the Creative Process
I was talking to someone about the creative process once and came up with some imagery for it. I described the initial phase as a kind of nebulous cloud; a haze that lurks around your head. It’s made up from the stuff of your life; here and there are vague forms, a ghost of a […]
-
John Fowles on his ‘first’ novel
Interesting comments about writing from word-master John Fowles: In every way except that of mere publishing date, The Magus is a first novel. I began writing it in the early 1950s, and both narrative and mood went through countless transformations. […] But I had no coherent idea of where I was going, in life as […]
-
Cinema and Language and Shit
It’s ‘Film Thursday!’, and today’s entry pompously considers what makes a film ‘good’; and particularly how we might appraise it from a linguistic perspective. Is the quality of a film merely a matter of subjective taste, or are there characteristics of cinema which can reliably suggest its merits? I might not actually answer these questions, […]
-
Victorian Punk
Picture a bunch of well-to-do art-school kids. They’re not truly excellent painters, but they basically say fuck-you to their teachers; we can paint better than any of you crusty old bastards. With supreme arrogance, they decided that the art world needed a revolution. Remarkably, they put their heads together and succeeded. This wasn’t the 1990s […]