“When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page.” — George Orwell, “Charles Dickens”
Categories: Books
Tags: Charles Dickens · George Orwell · quotes for writers
Entries Tagged as 'Charles Dickens'
A Face Behind the Page
June 16, 2010
Will e-novels be shorter?
April 6, 2010
A few weeks ago, over on Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell wrote a post that I’ve been turning over ever since. I would estimate that about 80% of the non-academic non-fiction books that I do not find a complete waste of time (i.e. good books in politics, economics etc — I can’t speak to genres that I [...]
Categories: Books · Writing
Tags: bookthree · Charles Dickens · ebooks
Dickens’ Outlines
March 29, 2010
Robert Olen Butler has said, The one thing that other aspiring artists have over writers is that many of them can view their mentors at work. A painter can sit at the back of a studio and watch her mentor paint, a ballet dancer can watch his mentor rehearse and perform. But you can’t really [...]
Categories: Creative Process · Writers · Writing
Tags: Charles Dickens · featured posts · How Writers Write · Little Dorrit · Robert Olen Butler
A Lesson from Dickens
February 12, 2010
In December 1839, Charles Dickens was 27 years old and already a superstar. He had written the Boz sketches, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby. Each was a double sensation, scoring first as a serial — the day an installment of Nickleby was released, according to a contemporary account, the Strand “looked almost verdant with the numerous [...]
Categories: Writers
Tags: Charles Dickens · creativity · featured posts
“Little Dorrit”: Dickens’ Teeming World
January 26, 2010
I’ve just finished Dickens’ Little Dorrit and my first thought on closing the book is how big and sprawling it seems next to our own spare, miniaturist novels. Not all of today’s novels are written this way, of course, but scan the Times bestseller list and you will see that generally the Raymond Carver/New Yorker [...]
Categories: Book Reviews
Tags: Charles Dickens · featured posts · Little Dorrit
Dickens and the Blacking Factory
January 4, 2010
At the age of 12, thanks to his father’s bankruptcy, Dickens found himself working in a rat-infested warehouse that produced bottles of liquid shoe polish. The work itself probably lasted for no more than a year, but it left scars on his imagination that never properly healed. His rage at social injustice, his sensitivity to [...]
Categories: Writers
Tags: Charles Dickens
Dickens and Me
December 31, 2009
I have been reading Little Dorrit the last couple of weeks and I am engrossed, even though life has been a little chaotic. I have been working feverishly on my own new novel, cranking out the last few chapters in rough draft. At the same time, my kids are on school vacation and our house [...]
Categories: Writers
Tags: Charles Dickens · Little Dorrit
Dickens vs. the Snarks
December 16, 2009
I am reading Dickens’s Little Dorrit at the moment, inspired by the rebroadcast of the wonderful PBS/BBC mini-series. (It is being rebroadcast here in Boston, at least. I don’t know if this is true elsewhere.) At the same time I am spending endless hours, as usual, idling on the web, particularly on blogs, where a [...]
Categories: Blogging · Internet · Writing
Tags: Charles Dickens · featured posts · Little Dorrit
