Literary reviews by Tim Love.
Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.

Monday, 20 January 2025

"The Writer's Block" by Jason Rekulak (Running Press, 2001)

A 7cm cube of paper - 672 pages of ideas to jump-start your writing. There are exercises ("Think back to the last person you saw with a physical disability. Imagine what they're doing right now"), triggers (a photo or a word), and tiny articles (e.g. "Three lousy movies about writer's block")

I like the idea of having 100s of little potential triggers, and the articles are interesting. I noted these -

  • Start a piece with "Why didn't you call me?"
  • Write a paragraph that uses "?", "!", "(", ")", ":" and ";".
  • Paul Auster's novel "Timbuktu" has a dog as the PoV.
  • Philip Marlowe liked playing chess against himself
  • "If you could script the plot for the dream you'll have tonight, what would it be?"
  • "Imagine what life would be like if you had the occupation you'd wanted as a child"

One of the ideas was "What does Jim really think of Huck Finn anyway". Now there's "James" by Percival Everett, amongst others.

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