Hacker Helper: Poe's Tips For Improving Stories.

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

USE THESE HACKER HELPERS WHEN YOUR TALE IS FLAT & FIZZLESS.

1.Employ an unreliable narrator, preferably one who doesn’t know he is insane and has no recollection of such events as digging into a grave to rip out the teeth of his recently departed lover.

2. Include a beautiful woman with raven locks and porcelain skin, preferably quite young, and let her die tragically of some unknown ailment.

3. Use grandiloquent words, such as heretofore, forthwith, and nevermore. A little Latin will also enhance the text.

4.Do not shy away from such grotesqueries as inebriation, imprisonment, insanity, and men costumed as orangutans being burned to death.

5. When in doubt, bury someone alive.

 

[R. Richard]

USE THESE HACKER HELPERS WHEN YOUR TALE IS FLAT & FIZZLESS.

3. Use grandiloquent words, such as heretofore, forthwith, and nevermore. A little Latin will also enhance the text.

Better yet, have a raven say, "Nevermore!"

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Faulkner: A Light In August

I cant do William Failkner. A ROSE FOR MISS EMILY and SPOTTED HORSES are genius, but until I came upon A LIGHT IN AUGUST I was certain Faulkner's bibliography would make a piss-poor fire if you burned every page of it.

Truman Capote voiced the same opinion of Faulkner during an interview. The whole bibliography is manure except for the works I cite above. So I got a copy of A LIGHT IN AUGUST yesterday and read about 150 pages of it before life forced me to set it aside.

Its not incredible but it is fucking good.

Whats so damned good about it?

Its almost entirely showing rather than telling. What the characters do reveals all their hidden secrets. For example: Lena Grove, unmarried and pregnant, spends 30 days walking the highway searching for the father of her baby. The morning she locates him he's drunk as a lord, stumbling around in a home thats burning to the ground, and the owner of the house is in bed decapitated.