A Writer's Moment: Words can, and do, define us

A Writer's Moment: Words can, and do, define us:   The old saying about "sticks and stones" causing harm while "words" can not or do not is, of course...

Words can, and do, define us

 

The old saying about "sticks and stones" causing harm while "words" can not or do not is, of course, hogwash. 

Over the course of our lives we have the opportunity to either say or write things that shape friendships, solve problems, or salve wounds, both real and imagined.  Words also can cause divisions, create problems, or leave lasting hurts, whether real or imagined. 

Words can, and do, define us, especially those put in our writings for posterity. 

As this poet wrote:

 

A Writer's Moment: 'Portraying the drama of the human spirit'

A Writer's Moment: 'Portraying the drama of the human spirit':   It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, ...

'Portraying the drama of the human spirit'

 

It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.” – Peter Ackroyd

 

Born in England on Oct. 5, 1949 Ackroyd has written award-winning biographies of such luminaries like William Blake, Charles Dickens and T.S. Eliot.  But it was his nearly two-dozen historical novels that first earned him acclaim.  Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards, Ackroyd is noted for the depth of his research and sheer volume of his work (nearly 50 nonfiction books, 19 novels, 4 books of poetry, and several television programs).   Since 2013, most of his work has been nonfiction, including this year's The English Soul: Faith of a Nation.

 

But it was fiction writing – starting with his 1982 novel The Great Fire of London – that  put Ackroyd on the writing map.   The book set the stage for a long sequence of novels dealing with the complex interaction of time and space and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place.” 

  

“I don’t think I ever read a novel until I was 26 or 27,” he said.  “I wanted to be a poet … (and) had no interest in fiction or biography, and precious little interest in history.  But those three elements in my life have become the most important.” 

A Writer's Moment: It's 'the right order of things'

A Writer's Moment: It's 'the right order of things':   “My first duty is to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. O...

It's 'the right order of things'

 

“My first duty is to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.” – David Brin

 

Astro-Physicist Brin, born in California on Oct. 6, 1950, has earned a Hugo, Locus, Campbell and Nebula Award – basically a “clean sweep” of all the top awards in the Science Fiction genre and a testament to his "putting things in the right order."

His Campbell Award winning novel The Postman was adapted into a Kevin Costner feature film, and his nonfiction book The Transparent Society won both the Freedom of Speech Award (from the American Library Association) and the McGannon Communication Award.   His most recent books are Castaways of New Mojave and a short story collection, The Best of David Brin, both published in 2021.

 

A Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, Brin helped establish the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC-San Diego.  A member of the advisory board of NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts group, he is a futurist consultant for corporations and government agencies and said he’s glad he was a scientist before becoming a writer.

 

“There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors write better science fiction," he said.   "And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.” 

A Writer's Moment: 'Just . . . moving at different speeds'

A Writer's Moment: 'Just . . . moving at different speeds':   “Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.” – Clive James Born in Australia on this date in 1939, James was an author, critic, b...