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.
Showing posts with label 'The Writers Block'. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 'The Writers Block'. Show all posts

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.