In Annie Proulx’s essay, “Inspiration? Head Down the Back Road, and Stop for the Yard Sales” She goes through great effort to detail the observation, analysis, and finally execution, of using everyday occurrences as inspiration for the creative process. Tiny snippets of life integrated into her psyche, thrusting her shovel into the earth and using whatever she digs up of it.
This brings into question, what is good writing? They say life imitates art, and art imitates life, an inseparable interdependence between what we create and what we live. For Proulx, the most important thing to remember is perspective. A perspective given via the observation of everyday life, a vast network of intertwining mundanities that paint a larger picture of the human experience. After all, our reality is something of a social unconscious, a series of universal contexts we don’t quiet notice, until we put pen to paper. How else can we connect on a universal level, then to imitate the small things that make us human?
…show more content…
The key to characters, and by proxy good writing, is an appeal to these universal struggles, these emotions which manifest themselves in many forms and conflicts. This is why we can sympathize with both a story about a down on his luck middle class American, and a fictional hobbit on a mystical quest, even if the former is probably a scenario we closer relate
In the “Interior Life”, Annie Dillard discusses the minds process of realizing the difference between imagination and reality. Dillard begins her narrative by recounting the childhood memory of an oblong shaped light that invaded her room every night, terrorizing her with the possibility of death. Beginning at the door of her bedroom this “oblong light” quickly slid across the wall, continued to the headboard of her little sister Amy’s bed and suddenly disappeared with a loud roar. Oftentimes it returned, noisily fading away just before seizing her, meanwhile Amy slept, blissfully unaware. Continuing on, Dillard describes the unforgettable discovery of the connection between the noise the oblong light made and the sound of the passing cars
There are many different types of characters in stories, and each has been described differently leaving different impression to readers. Reading some stories gives the readers the feeling of empathy for characters. Speaking about characteristic, it is great to know how a character feels in order to understand the story. Through this essay, I would like to show how stories make the readers feel empathy to other’s concerns, feelings, and troubles.
What if you were to wake up one day realizing your whole life was a dream? You would never have the opportunity to go back and enjoy some of the things you wish you had time to enjoy. Often in life, we go day by day unconsciously noticing the little beauties of life. In Deborah Landau’s “You’ve Got to Start Somewhere” lyric poem, she dreams the perfect dream of the world she wished she lived in other than the one she currently lives in, for it is corrupted and unappreciated. One of the first things that Landau appeals to her readers is the aspect of imagery.
“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all” - Dale Carnegie. In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the father continues through a multitude of intense situations along with his son, because of his desire and need to survive for his son in a post apocalyptic world.In order for one to survive, a person must be able to have and never relinquish the vigor and hope to withstand daily negative situations and to truly connect and create relationships with other humans.
In Cormac McCarthy’s Sci-Fi novel, “The Road”, two mysterious people, a father and his curious son, contact survival of the fittest during tragic apocalyptic times. With a shopping cart of food and supplies, they excavate into the remains of tattered houses, torn buildings and other sheltering places, while averting from troublesome communes. In the duration of the novel, they’re plagued with sickness that temporarily unable them to proceed onward. Due to the inopportune events occurring before the apocalypse, the wife of the son and father committed suicide due to these anonymous survivors lurking the remains of earth. The last people on earth could be the ‘bad guys’ as the young boy describes them. In page 47, the wife reacted to this, stating, “Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They'll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you won't face it. You'd rather wait for it to happen. But I can't.”
Phoenix’s journey is a little long just by walking alone in the middle of the
Sporre, Dennis J. The Creative Impulse: An Introduction to the Arts. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. 310-378.
After reading Originals by Adam Grant I was left feeling challenged. Grant brings about many different subjects, from parenting methods to organization, that have an impact on an individual’s creativity. I have never considered myself the most original thinker and I had always dreaded “outside of the box” projects, but Grant’s guidance throughout the book showed that that being a logical thinker and being original are not mutually exclusive concepts, as I had once thought. Instead, when it comes to being creative Grant focuses on how to break away from what he calls “default thinking”. Grant challenges the norms by considering that procrastination is not always the worst option, which I found to be interesting and a little stressful, as I am
People become inspired from all sorts of unique things from a play or a quote to a book of poems. Julia Alvarez’s “On Not Shoplifting Louise Bogan’s The Blue Estuaries” conveys the speaker’s discoveries and the passion and inspiration they created through the use of tone, imagery, similes, and alliteration.
Piper’s use of imagery in this way gives the opportunity for the reader to experience “first hand” the power of words, and inspires the reader to be free from the fear of writing.
... Each story has its characters, each character is given its unique personality, identity, and destiny. They are like us, but they live in books. To me, we can now read their stories and use what we read to connect them to what we already knew. Manny, the main character in “Crossing”, was being compared to a monkey tied up with chains, which resembled the loss of freedom for both of them.
Although classic literary works are considered key parts of the English curriculum in schools, many characters are unrealistically shallow because they are characterized by one singular emotion and not a balance of many emotions like real people. This singular distinction of their character makes them painfully unrealistic and unpleasant to read about. Especially in works of tragedy like Hamlet, Wuthering Heights, and Frankenstein, the characters are all slaves to their impulses and desires. This lack of forethought erodes their humanity.
I was always a creative child; it was something I just could not not be. Back then I didn’t know how to be ‘normal.’ While the other children wrote their essays about their mothers and pets or their best friends, I wrote about becoming birds or about ducks building robots. Truly. I suppose I could blame it on my parents – my father for trying to teach me how to read when I was too young and my mother for reading The Hobbit by JRR Tolkein to me as my bedtime story – but I know, truthfully, that it wasn’t their fault. It is no one’s fault, for I do not see my strange imagination as a terrible, abnormal thing. I do know that no one in particular influenced my creativity when I was younger, but I remember being obsessive about certain stories. I remember when I got my first computer – a 16-color piece of, well, garbage that barely ran. But even though it was so old and primitive, it opened new doors for my imagination, and I spent my childhood either playing games about knights and dragons or running around outside and acting out my own unscripted scenari...
Howard Gardner has studied many creative masters within the context of his theory of the three core elements of creativity. These include the relation between the child and the adult creator, the relation between the creator and others, and the relation between the creator and his or her work. Karen Horney’s childhood and adult life have been reflected in much of her work. She was born in 1885, the end of the Victorian era. Horney’s father was a “God-fearing fundamentalist who strongly believed that women were inferior to men and were the source of all evil in the world” (Hergenhahn & Olson...
Utterly and completely carefree they are, blowing and twisting on the maelstrom of their whims, each lunging twinge of a mental process reflected in miles. A laughing blue sky waiting to swallow you alive above, a gleefully roaring engine burning hungrily in front, the road and its devils grinning wickedly below, Jack Kerouac's characters go flying off randomly along the twisted contours of their lives in his autobiographical epic On the Road. But what is the meaning of the book, with all its casual deviations- -what is Kerouac trying to say without saying? To answer this question, a reader must scour the book's passages for rhetorical appeals. For example, in Part I, Chapter 11, page 63, when Paradise/Kerouac abandons his screenplay in order to find a job, a "shadow of disappointment" crosses Remi Boncoeur's face; even though no words are spoken at this point, the look on poor Remi's face is quite enough to form a rhetorical appeal. The look conveys the sentiments of the central characters of the book that trivialities such as everyday jobs should be cast aside in favor of following one's dream (and clearly writing is one of Kerouac's driving passions). For one, this is an appeal from character; Remi, crestfallen that Sal has turned his back on his dream, is a person who has no qualms about stealing couches, or food, or stripping a ghost ship of its valuables. In this way, his desire to live the moment is connected with his questionable morals--a problem somewhat relieved when his general goodness is illustrated by having him try to organize an evening out in order to put his father at ease. When Remi wants something, he takes it, but he's a decent, big-hearted person overall--almost childlike, really. It should be observed that he has the amorality of a little kid. Therefore, this appeal from character should be seen as a cry for living one's dream-- an almost naive way of thinking of things, seen from the childlike eyes of Remi Boncoeur. Second, this passage contains an appeal to emotion. Remi's facial expression intends to prod that part of Sal, and the reader, that would like to continually live on and for the moment, chasing dreams, and never for a moment surrender to the mundane. This is the message that the book chiefly promotes: do what you want to do when you want to do it, and have the most fun possible.