One measure of story quality is whether it results in projection: do readers project the characters outward? Can readers envision the characters in different situations? With a good story, you can catch yourself ruminating about one of the characters as you would ruminate about a person—But what would they have done? That doesn’t seem like them? Couldn’t they have remembered?
And perhaps one measure of good non-fiction is that it also triggers projection. The reader ends up with thoughts that are unanticipated and even unimaginable to the writer. Not because the reader has misunderstood, or is lost on some tangent, but because they’ve extrapolated the ideas and narrative onto a new trajectory.
So here’s a little review of my thinking and my essays from June, which will bring you, I do hope, at least a few new thoughts.
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Issue 165 — The Necessity of Precision
When a novel lasts this long, an ideal cocktail has come together, with quality, timing, and chance the most notable ingredients, without any single component sufficient for success.
Issue 166 — If an Artist Feels
Some artists want an audience to feel. Or to understand. Perhaps even to believe. And some artists want to unleash a primal scream, conveying what’s visceral to them just like a screaming child in a restaurant who, surely, affects everyone’s meal.
Issue 167 — Making Judgements (🔒 Paid Subscribers)
The line I don’t judge is one of the most facile and preposterous and fundamentally dishonest lines in contemporary life. You are a judging machine. You are, at all times, in all situations, a highly-refined and time-tested expert in judgement.
Issue 168 — Individual Lies
If I were to summarize all of Orwell’s essays, novels, and reviews, if I were to grossly oversimplify a lifetime of work, if I were to unfairly take a deliberative, erudite man and distill him into just a few words, I might write: the small lie matters.
Issue 169 — The Geometry of Stories
Underneath any story with character and conflict and emotion and all the usual elements that you find in a halfway decent narrative, there is, for me, a shape—there’s a geometry, a dimensionality, a visible manifestation of the words, and it always emerges as a clear black line in my mind, one that’s drawn instantaneously whenever I read.
Issue 170 — Disappointing Lines (🔒 Paid Subscribers)
A few thoughts about tedious exposition—on what’s necessary, what’s captivating, and what’s best left unsaid in a story.
Issue 171 — Sensations of Childhood
Summertime, when you’re young, lasts forever. Underneath a cloudless sky, in the heat, is where the short hours dissolve into long days.
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Thank you, as always, for reading.