MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

[Morrissette paraphrases] …in modern fiction the plot becomes unimportant, assumes forms of pure convention, or disappears altogether. (257) André Breton’s movement has at least had the merit of expressing “La netteté anormale avec laquelle apparaissent, dans les rêves les plus anodins, une chaise, un caillou, une main, la chute d’un débris quelconque… comme si le [...]

A few months ago I transcribed and tacked to my wall something Milch said in the writers’ room: “The tactics of fictive persuasion have nothing to do with reasoned discourse.” Then a couple of days ago I reread a longer transcript of some notes Milch gave regarding an earlier episode. He was talking about the [...]

Looking at how comic strips can be ordered.

Most readers when they think of the way a narrative (novel, comic, tv show) is ordered will think about plot: what Brian Richardson, in his “Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses,” describes as “a teleological sequence of events linked by some principle of causation; that [...]

Having finally read one of Metcalf’s works, I went back and reread this interview (from the always brilliant interviews at Dalkey Archive). It is worth the time for a number of interesting takes on prose, novels, structure, organization, etc.: I: When you eliminate so many of the conventions of the traditional novel (i.e., plot, and [...]