Things Learned From Theory

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Sneaky Writer Tricks: Estrangement and Disruption

So two lads with cellos do a pretty kick-ass cover of Guns’n’Roses Welcome to the Jungle in this youtube clip. As a fan of string instruments and the Gunners, I encourage you to check it out before we move on, ’cause it’s going to be relevant: Let me be completely honest here: this kind of thing rocks my world, and it kind of demonstrates one of the sneaky writer tricks I often mention to people in writing workshops: try to find a way to make the familiar strange. Everyone has their own definition of what makes great art, but mine has a lot in common with a Russian theorist named Victor Shklovsky who basically said that the role of art was estrangement – taking something familiar and making it alien so that the viewer is forced to re-examine it in a conscious way. Shklovsky essentially argues against the automatism of perception – the process where something has become so familiar that we

PeterMBall 13/05/2015

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Seven Notes on A Lover’s Discourse While Halfway Through the Book

One Habitual marking of quotes is one of those weird habits you pick up when you hang around universities for too long. I still do it, despite being out of the game for the better part of six years now, which means I frequently end up with shelves full of dog-eared books, notebooks filled with hastily scribbled details, and the occasional stray post-it with a quote scrawled across it with the bibliographic details on the back. Since I don’t really teach classes or write essays anymore, the vast majority of the quotes I mark tend to be because I truly adore the phrasing. There’s a great deal of beauty in theory and criticism, if you look for it. Exquisitely phrased ideas that sucker-punch you the same way a perfectly formed poetic line does, or well-turned phrase in a piece of prose. I’ve been reading Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse for the last two weeks. It started as a bit of

PeterMBall 30/12/2012

Big Thoughts

Random Thoughts While Reading Theory: Technique of Art

Think about writing for a moment. Not the let me tell you a story kind of writing I usually talk about here, but handwriting; the physical act of picking up a pencil and writing a sentence. Think about how automatic it’s become, how long it’s been since you’ve had to pay attention to the way your hand moves or the little tics in the muscle that allow you to scribe an L instead of a T. How many little things are happening without your knowledge, or the way the physical sensation of holding a pen stops registering because the act of writing is all just an automatic reflex now. Hold onto that thought, ‘cause we’re going to come back to it. Over the weekend I started one of my long-term projects in the name of the 80-point-plan – reading an anthology of literary theory essays with an aim towards filling in my patchy awareness of the field. My goal is

PeterMBall 03/08/2009

Tag: Things Learned From Theory

Sneaky Writer Tricks: Estrangement and Disruption

Seven Notes on A Lover’s Discourse While Halfway Through the Book

Random Thoughts While Reading Theory: Technique of Art

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