Reading Novels Like a Novelist Attempt 4: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The Synthesis of Pretty and a Mania for Prawns by Maria L. Berg 2023

Procedural Tips

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert was available as a free e-book on Project Gutenberg, so it is the first book in this series that I read on Kindle on my laptop.

After years of reading on kindle, I finally looked at all of its great note-taking features and went through them on Monday’s focus post. While reading this novel as a novelist I used the bookmarks to mark plot points, and the four highlighting colors I assigned:

pink – POV
orange – contradictory abstractions
yellow – dialogue
blue – character introduction and description

Though stylistic expectations have changed in the time since Madame Bovary’s publication—people aren’t patient with pages of setting description for example—there is still a lot to be learned.

Things I Learned

One thing I learned is that I’ve reached a time in my life when re-reading a book I read in college is the same as reading it for the first time. Whatever memory I had of Madame Bovary was thrown in the trash long ago to make room for the new. It may be time to re-read other things that I read a long time ago.

First, a little overview: Madame Bovary was originally serialized in Revue de Paris in 1856. The French government charged both Flaubert and the publisher with immorality but they were acquitted. Though the novel was considered immoral and scandalous, it was also considered the first example of realism in literature.

The novel begins with Charles Bovary as the main character, a non-remarkable, even simple young man whose mother has designs for him to have a better life. But the real main character is Emma, his second wife after his first undesirable wife suddenly dies. Emma is a romantic who is never satisfied with her life. She wants everything to be exciting and passionate, and Charles’s love and adoration is never enough. She thus takes a lover and when that goes badly, she takes another. Needless to say, that goes poorly as well, and she brings ruin to her family.

Plotting: Though Madame Bovary was written in the mid-1800s, it follows the same patterns of rising action of a contemporary novel. I found it fascinating that just marking the midpoint and quarter and three-quarter points of the novel from the location numbers got me to the main plot points. So I divided them again to see what came up. At each of these locations I found another important plot point: Charles’s marriage to Emma, the birth of their daughter coinciding with mentions of her impropriety around other men, her illness after Rodolphe drops her leading to the beginning of their financial ruin, the moment the bills are called in and Emma has officially brought ruin on her family. All of these scenes come every 520 locations on my kindle. Though the text seems to ramble on, it has a concisely mapped plot.

Omniscient POV: Omniscient, god-like point of view, in which the author can get in and out of each character’s thoughts at will, was much more popular in Flaubert’s time. Unlike the annoying, and out of place head-hopping in Louise Penny’s The Madness of Crowds, the change of POV didn’t take me out of the story. And being able to know the different character’s thoughts let the reader in on important secrets that the main character is not in on. This was used in one of the best parts of the book in my opinion. At the very beginning of Emma’s first affair the reader is told her lover’s intentions to drop her:

Poor little woman! She is gaping after love like a carp after water on a kitchen-table. With three words of gallantry she’d adore one, I’m sure of it. She’d be tender, charming. Yes; but how to get rid of her afterwards?”

You would think that this would make the whole love affair pointless to the reader, the only conflict being Emma’s broken heart and whether or not Charles finds out and how he reacts, but somehow Flaubert convinces the reader that Rodolphe may have had a change of heart right up to the moment Emma is prepared to run away with him. The reader knows he’s a cad, that he doesn’t care for anyone but himself, and yet he draws out the affair for so long, that the reader has time to imagine that change of heart.

Fantasy vs. Reality: Another way that Flaubert uses this omniscient point of view is to jump into character’s fantasies and compare them with reality. He uses future tense to show the reader the character’s desires:

“Léon with solemn steps walked along by the walls. Life had never seemed so good to him. She would come directly, charming, agitated, looking back at the glances that followed her, and with her flounced dress, her gold eyeglass, her thin shoes, with all sorts of elegant trifles that he had never enjoyed, and with the ineffable seduction of yielding virtue. The church like a huge boudoir spread around her; the arches bent down to gather in the shade the confession of her love; the windows shone resplendent to illumine her face, and the censers would burn that she might appear like an angel amid the fumes of the sweet-smelling odours.

But she did not come.”

Flaubert uses “would” to slip into Leon’s imagination; to show the reader his hoped for future event. Then slips back into past tense to show reality again with the opening line of the next paragraph, “But she did not come.”

Description: Though Flaubert goes on about what people are wearing, and the description of the town where Charles Bovary sets up his medical practice goes on for about eight pages, there is plenty to be learned from his descriptions. One of my favorites is from inside Rodolphe’s head when thinking about his mistress:

Then the difficulties of love-making seen in the distance made him by contrast think of his mistress. She was an actress at Rouen, whom he kept; and when he had pondered over this image, with which, even in remembrance, he was satiated— “Ah! Madame Bovary,” he thought, “is much prettier, especially fresher. Virginie is decidedly beginning to grow fat. She is so finiky about her pleasures; and, besides, she has a mania for prawns.”

I’m not sure why I love that so much, but contrasting beauty with a mania for prawns makes me smile.

Another thing I noticed about Flaubert’s descriptions is he is very detailed about his physical descriptions, but also includes actions within those descriptions. Like when we first meet Charles as a boy:

“. . . standing in the corner behind the door so that he could hardly be seen, was a country lad of about fifteen, and taller than any of us. His hair was cut square on his forehead like a village chorister’s; he looked reliable, but very ill at ease. Although he was not broad-shouldered, his short school jacket of green cloth with black buttons must have been tight about the arm-holes, and showed at the opening of the cuffs red wrists accustomed to being bare. His legs, in blue stockings, looked out from beneath yellow trousers, drawn tight by braces, He wore stout, ill-cleaned, hob-nailed boots.”

In this example where and how he stands as well as his clothing is used to show that he doesn’t belong.

And when we are first introduced to Emma:

“Mademoiselle Emma tried to sew some pads. As she was a long time before she found her work-case, her father grew impatient; she did not answer, but as she sewed she pricked her fingers, which she then put to her mouth to suck them. Charles was surprised at the whiteness of her nails. They were shiny, delicate at the tips, more polished than the ivory of Dieppe, and almond-shaped. Yet her hand was not beautiful, perhaps not white enough, and a little hard at the knuckles; besides, it was too long, with no soft inflections in the outlines. Her real beauty was in her eyes. Although brown, they seemed black because of the lashes, and her look came at you frankly, with a candid boldness.”

She is introduced in a domestic activity that she’s not good at. The first physical descriptions are of her hands, and it is said they are not beautiful, but then are used in contrast with her eyes. These contrasts and comparisons are what make Flaubert’s descriptions so interesting. They are saying much more than what is physically on the page.

Romance and Sex:

I can’t talk about Madame Bovary without talking about romance and sex. Unlike last week’s very cliched romance that as part of the meta-novel was only reiterating the stated fact that all novels are a romance, Madame Bovary is an anti-romance. The premise of the novel is that romantic notions lead to disillusionment and ruin.

Emma is a despicable character from start to finish because nothing is never good enough, and she feels so put upon by everyone and everything because she can never  be satisfied. The novel expresses again and again how love wanes and romance is foolish. So lets take a look at the questions about romance and sex in Madame Bovary:

How did the author approach emotional love? Flaubert mocked emotional love throughout the book. Charles loved and trusted Emma. He adored her, thought they had the perfect marriage. He never imagined the truth. None of the relationships show actual love. There is doting, there are families, and marriages, but everyone is selfish and conniving.


How did the author approach physical love? Desperate, stolen moments. One of the best scenes, the carriage ride, doesn’t mention it at all:

“And the lumbering machine set out. It went down the Rue Grand-Pont, crossed the Place des Arts, the Quai Napoleon, the Pont Neuf, and stopped short before the statue of Pierre Corneille. “Go on,” cried a voice that came from within. The cab went on again, and as soon as it reached the Carrefour Lafayette, set off down-hill, and entered the station at a gallop. “No, straight on!” cried the same voice. . . .From time to time the coachman, on his box cast despairing eyes at the public-houses. He could not understand what furious desire for locomotion urged these individuals never to wish to stop. He tried to now and then, and at once exclamations of anger burst forth behind him. . . .And on the harbour, in the midst of the drays and casks, and in the streets, at the corners, the good folk opened large wonder-stricken eyes at this sight, so extraordinary in the provinces, a cab with blinds drawn, and which appeared thus constantly shut more closely than a tomb, and tossing about like a vessel. . . .a bared hand passed beneath the small blinds of yellow canvas, and threw out some scraps of paper that scattered in the wind, and farther off lighted like white butterflies on a field of red clover all in bloom. At about six o’clock the carriage stopped in a back street of the Beauvoisine Quarter, and a woman got out, who walked with her veil down, and without turning her head.”

And there you have it, the scandalous sex act as described by Flaubert. Talk about letting the reader imagine what isn’t said, what is purposefully left out and only hinted at. He was definitely a master of leading the reader to conclusions.

Did it develop the characters’ personalities? Yes. Emma couldn’t be satisfied with anyone, but her romantic notions continued, always believing there was something more out there. This made even the men who cared for her lose interest over time.

Did it further the plot? Absolutely. Emma’s appetites made her spend way beyond her means which eventually led to her complete ruin and that of her husband and child. Her inability to think of anything but her own excitement made everyone unhappy, especially herself.

The Said in the Not Said by Maria L. Berg 2023

Applying What I Learned

Using Kindle for Developmental Edits: I must admit I’m excited about the nuts and bolts aspects of what I learned this week more than anything else. I mean Flaubert did some amazing writing and is still influential for a reason, but I just put my novel draft into Kindle, and wow what a great tool for draft review.

When you open Kindle and click on File you’ll find the option “Import a local PDF.” So you don’t have to upload your manuscript to amazon or anything, you can just save it as a PDF. Once it’s imported into Kindle, you can use all of the different tools I talked about for reading novels like a novelist for your own draft.

The first thing I did was bookmark my midpoint and quarter and three-quarter points, then the half-way points between each of those. I can already see that my major plot points aren’t where they need to be, and I need to work on intensifying my conflict and action. I mean, just like that, using the go to page functions and bookmarks, I’ve already clued into issues with my draft.

I can use the highlight function for highlighting errors still in the draft that I can quickly change. And best of all I can use the search function to look at each of my characters in turn by typing their names into search one at a time. This really is exciting for this early stage of developmental editing.

POV: Though I won’t be using omniscient POV, my novel is in close third-person, I can still try to find a place in the story where the reader is aware of something the main character isn’t. How can I do that? Perhaps she observes something but interprets it incorrectly giving the reader the possibility to see the truth before she does. How else can I get information to the reader that my main character isn’t aware of? Sometimes chapters start with a more omniscient narration and then zoom back into close-third, my narrator could tell the reader something that my main-character doesn’t know during one of these more zoomed out moments. Or I could use blatant foreshadowing, though I liked the subtle foreshadowing used in The Manual of Detection. Maybe I can use that technique to direct the reader toward information my main character is unaware of.

Fantasy vs. Reality: I can use this technique to show what my main character hopes for and then make her face reality. This could work well to show how she keeps going when everything is going wrong. It could also show how obsessed she is with the unsolved case, that she harbors some fantasy of vindication that will happen when she solves it. Or maybe there’s a different more warped fantasy of her dead friend finally being at peace or something. I’ll use the technique as a writing exercise and see what comes up.

Description: One of my favorite bits of description in the whole novel was the “mania for prawns.” It’s just so good as the contradiction to “pretty.” How can I describe people in comparison to others in such a fun and graphic way? It says so much about the character making the comparison as well. Of course, since I’m not writing in omniscient POV or even multiple POVs, it would be my main character making the comparisons, so what does she find ugly? What to her is the equivalent of “a mania for prawns?” I’m excited to play with that idea for all of my characters. A couple of my characters would say those kinds of things out loud. Knowing what disgusts them about other people can make for good dialogue as well as character development.

Romance: The thing I learned from Flaubert that I can apply to my novel is to let the reader read between the lines. The carriage ride is a great example of describing one part of the action while letting the reader imagine what else is going on that they aren’t seeing. What is going on behind closed doors? A character could overhear something and jump to the wrong conclusions; or overhear something and jump to the right conclusions; a character could see something like the hand coming out from behind the curtains and think the person is someone other than it is. There are so many things that can be happening behind a curtain.

Next Steps

I’m excited to say this is working. I never expected that reading an e-book as a novelist, Madame Bovary of all things, would open up such a world of discovery for both my physical process and writing techniques. I’m excited to see what my new Kindle note-taking skills will uncover in a contemporary thriller. The next novel I’ll be discussing is Unspeakable Things by Jess Lourey. I’m excited to study it because its description says it was inspired by true events from the author’s hometown. And though my novel is very loosely inspired by actual events, I’m hoping that Lourey’s novel might be a good comparison (comp) for my own.

The Review of Resolution

Despiness by Maria L. Berg 2023

Today’s Poetics prompt at dVerse Poets Pub is about resolutions. Every year about this time is when New Year’s resolutions fizzle and dissolve, then are forgotten. Last year, I was completely determined to change my behaviors: I read everything about habits, goals, and motivation; I attended an online conference on having my best year; I followed through and did the work; and it worked for a while. But, as usual, life happened, and it all went out the window.

This year, I did not make any resolutions, but I have made a couple significant changes, so is there a difference between making resolutions and actual resolve? Only time will tell.

The prompt for writing the poem is to weave one of five given pieces of advice into a resolution poem.

The Resolve of Despiness

This year there was no reason for a resolution.
I poured my mini-bottle of champagne
into a long-stemmed glass
took it out on the dock
into the strangely warm night
and truly enjoyed the fireworks reflecting on the water

Something had changed in my constitution
as I raised my glass to everyone and no one
and said aloud, “I am happy now!”
The neighbors came out with sparklers
and I yelled Happy New Year, and they yelled it back
I didn’t want anything to change, just stay the same

What a frightening thing to think; this dissolution
is the state I’ve waited for but it took
so long, so many failed attempts
so many previous examples
that happiness cannot last, the acknowledgment
itself dares the universe to take it away.

Contradictory Abstractions: The Synthesis of Beauty and Ugliness

Beaugliness by Maria L. Berg 2023

It’s the last day of the first month of the new year, and I woke up early, tore apart my mirrorworld, and started fresh. Though conceptually I feel like my ideas are coming together, the images aren’t yet what I’ve been hoping for. How about you? How did your month go?

This week I’m exploring my second call to action: “To find the ugliness in beauty and the beauty in ugliness; uglify the beautiful, or beautify the ugly.” Last week I was excited by Hegel’s dialectic thinking. This morning I found another correlation in neuroscience in Eric R. Kandel’s The Age of Insight.

Coming to Synthesis

Nobel prize winning neuroscientist, Kandel, writes, “Beauty does not occupy a different area of the brain than ugliness. Both are part of a continuum representing the values the brain attributes to them, and both are encoded by relative changes in activity in the same areas of the brain. This is consistent with the idea that positive and negative emotions lie on a continuum and call on the same neural circuitry. Thus, the amygdala, commonly associated with fear, is also a regulator of happiness.”

I love how my goal of creating images that show how contradictory abstract nouns converge works with the physiology of the brain.

While thinking about today’s photo-shoot and my call to action, I contemplated if capturing synthesis would actually make great art. Isn’t it the extremes that people find exciting? Not the negation, the accomplished stasis?

Kandel says, “Our response to art stems from an irrepressible urge to re-create in our own brains the creative process—cognitive, emotional, and empathic—through which the artist produced the work. This creative urge of the artist and the beholder presumably explains why essentially every group of human beings in every age and in every place throughout the world has created images, despite the fact that art is not a physical necessity for survival. Art is an inherently pleasurable and instructive attempt by the artist and the beholder to communicate and share with each other the creative process that characterizes every human brain—a process that leads to an Aha! moment, the sudden recognition that we have seen into another person’s mind, and that allows us to see the truth underlying both the beauty and the ugliness depicted by the artist.”

Thus, each of these images I share with you whether beautiful, or ugly, or somewhere along the continuum, is a peek into my mind. Welcome. It’s busy, and often cluttered, but there’s a lot of fun creating going on.

To make today’s images, using only white string-lights, I used printed transparencies of sections of my images that showed the shape both right-side-up and upside-down. I then created new images showing the filter both right-side-up and upside-down. Is it the synthesis? The negation? I’m not sure, but I had fun with my new terminology in my titles.

Beaugliful by Maria L. Berg 2023

Next Steps

I’m going to continue to explore beauty and ugliness for a while. Kant keeps coming up as I study abstract art, so I want to read through his works that I downloaded from Project Gutenberg.

Using my new kindle skills I searched for beauty and ugly in Kant’s Critique of Judgement and beauty had 500 matches, ugly had 4. I find that fascinating. Why the crazy imbalance? Is it because people seek out beauty and not ugliness?

In the section called “Dialectic of the Aesthetical Judgement,” Kant says, “. . . the conflict between judgements of Taste, so far as each man depends merely on his own taste, forms no Dialectic of taste; because no one proposes to make his own judgement a universal rule. There remains therefore no other concept of a Dialectic which has to do with taste than that of a Dialectic of the Critique of taste (not of taste itself) in respect of its principles; for here concepts that contradict one another (as to the ground of the possibility of judgements of taste in general) naturally and unavoidably present themselves.”

As I read it, there is no conflict between beauty and ugliness when it has to do with one’s own ideas and feelings, the conflict arises when people’s aesthetics are different. Something to think about.

How to Read Novels Like a Novelist (RNLN): Kindle Edition

Reading a Novel in Kindle

Last week I “won” my first physical book (other than a coloring book) from Library Thing. Won is in quotes because it is actually an exchange for my volunteer labor of reviewing the book, but they call it winning. The coming book that will arrive in my mailbox is a poetry collection which I’ll need to read carefully for review, so I thought it would be the perfect specimen for a new segment of this experiment: Reading Poetry Like a Poet. Then I thought what I’ve been doing is more specific than Reading Like a Writer. In Bunn’s essay “How to Read Like a Writer”, he was talking about reading non-fiction more than fiction. No, what I’m doing is Reading Novels like a Novelist. So for the sake of specificity, I’ve decided to change the names of these posts going forward, and thus the new acronym will be RNLN which I found out stands for the Dutch Royal Navy, but I don’t think that will cause confusion.

Choosing the Novels

After playing with all the great note-taking features in Kindle, I thought of all the Thrillers I’ve collected through the Amazon Prime First Readers program that I haven’t read because I have trouble staying engaged with e-books.  I thought that reading like a novelist might change that, so instead of moving on to taking notes in an old paperback, I’m going to stick with Kindle for another week.

To pick which one to read, I decided to take my own advice and choose one that may help me in the future by looking at each one for hints that it could be a possible comp (comparison to my novel) and for possible agents that I might want to query.

I chose Unspeakable Things by Jess Lourey because it’s description says it was inspired by a true story from the author’s home town, and takes place in a small community. So it could be a comp. Her agent is Jill Marsal who is the founding partner of Marsal Lyon Literary Agency and represents many bestselling authors. Her webpage says she is actively looking for new projects.

Reading Novels Like a Novelist with Kindle

For some reason I couldn’t get the Project Gutenberg .mobi file to load onto my tablet, so I used Kindle on my laptop to read it. It turned out to be a good thing because using the horizontal format, I could have the notebook feature open at the same time as the text, and search, and also see the function of the flashcards. All fun, simple, and useful tools.

You may already know all of this, but it is new to me, and part of my new processes of reading novels like a novelist, so I thought I would share. Skip ahead, or skim if you already take notes with Kindle.

Above the Library button, if you click on “View,” there are some options. The first thing I tried, near the bottom of the list, was  Color Mode. There you have the option changing the regular reading mode from a white page to a Sepia, or more aged, pinkish hue, or to a black page with white lettering. I stuck with black type on the white page.

Let’s go through the note-taking options I found reading in kindle:

  • bookmarks
  • Go: location ctrl+g
  • search
  • highlighting
  • color-coding
  • notes
  • notebook
  • flashcards

bookmarks: the bookmark  is the small ribbon with a plus-sign in the right corner. To bookmark a page, click on it. I always thought this was just to hold my place when I closed the application, but reading as a novelist it proves to have other useful functions. Under “View” above Color Mode you’ll see “Bookmarks.” When you click on it, it opens the notebook and shows you all of the pages you’ve bookmarked with their location. This gave me an idea: use the bookmarks to mark the expected locations of main plot-points. Madame Bovary has 6161 locations (it’s one of those files that doesn’t show page numbers, but I checked with a different book, and this works for pages as well), so I cut that in half and book-marked it, then cut it in half again to get my quarter, and three-quarter points, and book-marked those. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but they lined up with major plot points of the novel: The big party, the clubbed-foot surgery, and leaving the church for the carriage ride.

Go: location ctrl+g: Next to “View” at the top left of the page is “Go.” And the last thing in that menu is Location. You can quickly open the location window by pressing control and the letter g at the same time. Once there, you can quickly get to any location in the book which comes in handy when you want to review your notes, or go to the different locations that you find when using search.

search: This wonderful function that is accessed by clicking the magnifying glass on the left of the page. You can type in any word or phrase and every instance in the text is listed with its location. Since the abstractions I’m looking at are beauty and ugliness, I searched for them. Searching for beauty in the novel Madame Bovary got me thirty-eight matches to beauty and beautiful. Typing in ugly came back with four matches to ugly and ugliness.

highlighting: highlighting in Kindle is simple, hold the button on the mouse and scroll over the text. Once you have selected the text, a menu appears, giving you four colors to choose from, an option to Add a Note, Copy, look it up in the Dictionary, or Search. If you decide you don’t want to highlight the text after all, click on the white part of the page. If you have highlighted text and want to remove the highlight, click anywhere in the highlighted text and click on the colored circle with the X in it.

color coding: as I mentioned, there are only four colors to choose from: pink, orange, yellow, and blue. Before starting, it’s a good idea to have a plan, because an organized color-code can help with other features. Remember, you can use bookmarks for plot points, so that offers a fifth option.

notes: It’s a good idea to leave yourself a quick note as you go. Click anywhere in your highlighted text and click Add Note. Then type in the box and click save. If the notebook is open, you can type a note under the text in the notebook.

notebook: In the right top corner of the page next to the bookmark symbol is a rectangle that says “Show Notebook.” On the right hand side will now be a list of everything you’ve highlighted organized by chapter and location. At the top of the notebook under the words “Notes and Highlights” it says “Filter by,” if you click on the arrow after All Items, there are options to look at your Bookmarks, your notes, and sort your highlights by color. There are little stars on each highlight, so you can choose certain ones and then sort by Starred. And if you’re connected to the internet, you can look at what most people have highlighted and compare that with your own. You can add notes to each of your highlighted texts if you haven’t already.

flashcards: Next to the words “Notes and Highlights” in the Notebook there’s a rectangle that says “+Flashcards.” This is a fun feature that will take anything you have filtered in your notebook into flashcards: a really great tool for studying for an exam. There’s a symbol of overlapping rectangles under the magnifying glass on the left hand side of the page that brings up your flashcards and will show them to you so you can quiz yourself and mark what you got right and wrong. I’m not quite sure how I want to use this function for reading novels like a novelist, but it’s something to think about. Do you have any ideas for how to use the flashcard function to be a better novelist?

I think you can probably see why I want to read and study another novel on my kindle next week to explore all of the interesting tools and how best to use them.

Reading Like a Novelist in Kindle

It’s All Coming Together

The draft for my novel that I wrote during NaNoWriMo last November came from the idea of incorporating my study of contradictory abstract nouns into my characters. I really like the idea that the big conflicts in life come from the fact that abstractions that all of us think we understand like love, beauty, happiness, wisdom, and truth, are actually undefinable, and defined differently by everyone, and always changing.

My study into contradictory abstractions is helping me see the big picture in a new way. I can see how my interests in music, art, science, history, and philosophy overlap.

By reading Madame Bovary for my modernist class, and as a novelist, I can see that overlap plainly. Like meeting someone you’ve never seen before, then seeing them all over town, the moment I finished the class lectures on Madame Bovary, the novel started coming up all over my other reading.

In ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound he says, “An attempt to set down things as they are, to find the word that corresponds to the thing, the statement that portrays, and presents, instead of making a comment, however brilliant, or an epigram.
Flaubert is the archetype.”

Later he says, “If you want to study the novel, go, READ the best you can find. All that I know about it, I have learned by reading:” and in his short list he includes Madame Bovary, though I believe he intends for us to read it in French.

I was excited to find a book called Painterly Abstraction In Modernist American Poetry by Charles Altieri in my library system, but was having trouble getting into it. But after reading Madame Bovary I found it referenced in the fourth chapter called “Modernist Irony and the Kantian Heritage. The second section of the chapter is all about Flaubert and Madame Bovary. He states,”No work surpasses Madame Bovary at defining the demands that eventually led European art to Modernism. Dramatically, Flaubert’s novel affords a keen critical analysis of the conditions that trap desire in the law of heteronomy.” (heteronomy: noun 1. the condition of being under the domination of an outside authority, either human or divine.) Altieri later writes, “An adequate account of the text must indicate the lines of force established by at least three fundamental factors of the writing: its complex rendering of persons, of scenes, and of the emotions they elicit in the audience; its foregrounding of the authorial act as itself a mode of eliciting and playing out desires; and its constant reminders of the artificiality or constructedness of what nonetheless capable of shaping emotions that carry over into the world beyond the specific text.

It’s this idea of art for art’s sake that was discussed in class, and also connects Modernism to Abstract Art. So I’ll talk more about that tomorrow.

The Week in Review: Reading, Writing, and Abstraction

Mountain by Maria L. Berg 2023

How was your week? Did you try reading like a writer? Though I didn’t find a lot to apply to my novel from The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill, I did have fun brainstorming unique formats for my novel, and it inspired me to get a copy of S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst from my local library system. I was curious to see how all the inserts worked. They are neatly tucked within the pages of the book and the book comes in a box sleeve that is velcroed shut. Imagine my happy surprise when the first insert is two copies of a letter. The first in Swedish and the second its translation. It was fun to be able to read the letter in Swedish and also see their translation.

The Ship of Theseus, which is the fictitious book in which the characters write in the margins, is also the name of an interesting philosophical puzzle which asks, if every piece of a ship is replaced over time, is it still the same ship when it doesn’t have a single original piece left?

As for the reading experience I haven’t figured it out yet. There are so many different things to read: The translator’s preface and footnotes is one story, the novel, the layers and layers of notes between the students, and the inserted materials. I thought I would read through the novel first, but the notes were too distracting, so I think I’ll have to spend the time on each page to read the novel, the translator’s notes and the students written notes all at once.

I finished reading Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert for my coursera.org course “The Modern and the Postmodern” through Wesleyan University. In class, it was an example of the Disillusionment. I know I read Madame Bovary as an undergrad, but I really didn’t remember anything about it as I read. It was long and boring and the characters were abhorrent people, but that’s why it’s going to be interesting to discuss for reading as a writer. I found a lot to learn from it and apply to my work.

I liked the note-taking capabilities in Kindle and will talk about that tomorrow. I also found some interesting surprise connections  in my other reading that I’ll talk about tomorrow.

This week I found a new-used mirror large enough to create a mirrorworld that has eternal depth, as in mirrors reflecting mirrors all the way to infinity. I’m excited to explore all my new techniques within this space while thinking dialectically. My idea for this week is: if I take an image that includes my shape both right side up, and upside down and backwards, and I use that shape as a filter to take a photo of the shapes right side up, and upside down and backwards, will that get me closer to synthesis? I’ll try it out and talk more about these new ideas of capturing synthesis on Tuesday.

Moon by Maria L. Berg 2023

Using drum beats to create poetic lines

This week’s rhythm I’ve been playing with is: one, two, three, four and. This is the cha-cha rhythm. I looked through my old records and the only cha-cha I found was by Henri Mancini called “Something for Sellers.”(Fun fact: Henri Mancini also wrote the theme song for Remington Steele which I enjoyed as a kid, and is a fun distraction available on Amazon Prime Video.)

The last word of each phrase should be a trochee, having the stress on the first syllable. Until this week I was only looking at the rhythm as syllables not the stress of the words, but with this four & beat, it feels like the trochee vs. iamb(ic) foot is important.

Where is this going? Who’s out there knowing?
Can I make something, from all this nothing?
two rights come center, once new thoughts enter
is the mean better, once her match met her?

After four week of looking at this idea of drum beats becoming lines of poetry, I thought it would be fun to see how the lines work and sound together. Let’s see what happens. First I’ll take four lines from each of the patterns I’ve played with so far in order:

I say I’m good when we meet, but you’re not buying
I talk of truth, honestly, I know I’m lying
If truth is fine, why do I find yours is ugly?
If flaws make rich, why do I wish to be smudge free?

but I was waffling, so I just followed
to enjoy the talk and be in the walk
but I could not stop my mind from worry
we needed to go and be in a hurry

the third unknown point joins in unseen lines
to a future hurt that your secrets hide
where the haunting blues find life’s conflict caught
ache in yearning flesh moves the wand’ring eye

Where is this going? Who’s out there knowing?
Can I make something, from all this nothing?
two rights come center, once new thoughts enter
is the mean better, once her match met her?


Now let’s try one line from each in a row to make the quatrains:

I say I’m good when we meet, but you’re not buying
but I was waffling, so I just followed
the third unknown point joins in unseen lines
Where is this going? Who’s out there knowing?

I talk of truth, honestly, I know I’m lying
to enjoy the talk and be in the walk
to a future hurt that your secrets hide
Can I make something, from all this nothing?

If truth is fine, why do I find yours is ugly?
but I could not stop my mind from worry
where the haunting blues find life’s conflict caught
two rights come center, once new thoughts enter

If flaws make rich, why do I wish to be smudge free?
we needed to go and be in a hurry
ache in yearning flesh moves the wand’ring eye
is the mean better, once her match met her?

*I think I like that. This second one has some interesting connections happening.

I guess I’ll be moving on to a slightly more complicated drum beat this week. I’ll have to figure out how that works with this idea of drum beats and poetry. Maybe I’ll see how a simple drum fill works with this idea.

I chose “(I’m Afraid The) Masquerade is Over” by Herb Magidson and Allie Wrubel as the song to work on this week as I continue working on my second call to action, “To find the ugliness in beauty and the beauty in ugliness; uglify the beautiful, or beautify the ugly.”

Memento Poetry Form

Color Explosion by Maria L. Berg 2023

The Meeting the Bar prompt at dVerse Poets Pub is a new to me poetry form called “Memento.” The Memento form “created by Emily Romano is a poem about a holiday or an anniversary, consisting of two stanzas as follows: the syllable count should be 8 beats for line one; 6 beats for line two; and two beats for line three. This is repeated twice for each stanza. The rhyme scheme is: a/b/c/a/b/c for each of the two stanzas.” Here’s my attempt at my first Memento:

sky lighting

we gather, heads tilted, eyes wide
as pyros, born of flame
alight
each explosion elicits cries
of fright then quickly came
delight

brilliant color blossoms fall wide
Boom! rockets rise again
free flight
when lights sparkle in hopeful eyes
we bathe in warm ash rain                                                                  
tonight

                                                             

Light Explosion by Maria L. Berg 2023

Reading Like a Writer Attempt 3: The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill

RLW VI by Maria L. Berg 2023

Procedural Tips

Since The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill was so different than the others I’ve looked at so far, I had to come up with another color code for my post-its and notes. I marked the beginning of each of the letters with orange, thinking that on second read it would be useful to read through all the letters together.

I used yellow for plot points, and based on page count, I marked the midpoint, quarter, and three-quarters, and the midpoints of those, to mark the possible places for important plot points.

This meta-novel had authors talking shop, so I chose neon-pink for craft talk.
I used blue for character, and green for setting.
And I marked the romance scenes in light pink.

Things I Learned

With this book, what started out as a fun and unique format for a mystery novel turned out to take away from what was a fine mystery with fun characters and good twists. I learned that a clever idea with great potential can end up taking away from the story instead of adding.

First, a little overview:

The novel starts with a letter from an author named Leo who lives in Boston to an author named Hannah who lives in Australia. The reader only sees the letters Leo writes to Hannah, but it appears that it is a correspondence relationship that has been going on for years. After the letter, is the first chapter of Hannah’s novel. The novel is about a writer from Australia who gets a writing fellowship to Boston and is just starting a crime thriller / mystery when she, and the people sitting near her in the library hear a scream. Curiosity over the scream binds them together and inspires her novel.  The format of the book continues with a letter at the end of each chapter commenting on the one just read.

I really liked the concept and was really enjoying it until the letters started talking about the pandemic. I wasn’t expecting to read a second pandemic novel in a row. I though it was handled well in The Madness of Crowds, but I did not think it was approached well in this novel. The choices made after the pandemic came up in the letters were more and more disappointing, and I ended up feeling like an idea with great potential was squandered.

Shop Talk: Because this was a novel about a novelist writing a novel, among other writers, there was a lot of interesting shop talk and some of it felt like a writer’s workshop. Here are five moments I found interesting:

1. “True. The scream might have been what the crime writers call”—he paused for effect—”a red herring.”
I smile. “Still a heck of a coincidence.”
“They do happen in reality, even if they are a bad plot device.” Cain rises and excuses himself . . .

The first two times I read that, and even as I wrote it down, I thought the author was having a character say that red herrings were a bad plot device. That rubbed me the wrong way. Especially in mysteries and thrillers, red herrings are necessary. However, I now think the comment is meant to say that coincidence is a bad plot device. Clarity of meaning is the lesson here, as much as a discussion of red herrings vs. coincidence.

2. Words are put down in solitude; there is a strange privacy to those disclosures. Time to get used to the revelation before readers are necessarily taken into your confidence.
. . . “It’s part him, part me, part stuff I just made up.”
“The magic formula,” I say.

If there is a magic formula for writing, is that it? Using some truth about another person, some truth about oneself, and making the rest up? Something to think about.

3. ” . . . allowing what is unsaid to carry the narrative, aware that overt emotion could well move the story into melodrama.”

There’s a lot packed in that partial sentence. What does it mean to allow the unsaid to carry the narrative? Is the real story read between the lines? It’s been drummed into me to show the character’s emotions, to never name the emotion and let the reader define how the character is feeling, and yet does it turn the scene into a melodrama if my character is always emoting?

4. “Have you . . . have you always written romance?”
“Yes, and what’s more, so have you . . .everybody but the people who write instruction manuals is writing romance. We dress our stories up with murders, and discussions about morality and society, but really we just care about relationships.”

I love this point. And the romance in this book is so cliché and formulaic, and yet works so well with the plot that it’s inseparable. The attempt at a love triangle or at least a second love interest is poorly timed and doesn’t work (in my opinion) and turns the nice other option into a bit of a stalker figure, I guess, but a nice stalker? Anyway, The shop talk about every story being a romance is one of the highlights of this novel.

5. “Would my book, my words be different if I was a murderer, for example?” Cain asks carefully.
I think about it for a moment, “Words have meaning. I suppose who he author is, what he’s done might change that meaning.”
“Isn’t meaning more to do with the reader?”
“No . . . a story is about leading a reader to meaning. The revelation is theirs but we show them the way. I suppose the morality of the writer influences whether you can trust what they are showing you.”

Leading a reader to meaning to me is more about the premise of the story than the author’s connection, but it makes sense that if a novel has led the reader to a realization through the proof of its premise and then the reader finds out something horrible about that author, the premise and journey could lose merit, and the reader could feel betrayed, especially if the author’s actions in real life are hypocritical/antithetical to the premise. In other words, the premise of the novel should be something I can live up to. Not some idealistic impossibility that my own actions prove false.

That’s really helpful at this stage in my writing. I need to pinpoint the novel’s premise and make sure I prove it by the end. I’ll brainstorm every premise I can imagine until I find the one this novel is truly about. Then I’ll do the same for each of my five contradictory abstraction characters. And while I do that, I’ll make sure that I’m not telling people to be something I’m not, or change in some way that I wouldn’t, or do something hypocritical to how I am. And yet, isn’t that what readers buy? Complete hypocrisy? Scandal, lies, extreme behaviors? Wasn’t Poetry selling magazines? Like magazines do? Also something to think about.

Romance and Sex:

How did the author approach emotional love? A connection through a shocking or memorable (traumatic: though in this case only curious at first) event.  In relation to herself: he is also a published author. Then through play: a game of looking at places and imagining what happened there. Talking shop, then confession which leads to trust, belief in an undeniable truth.
How did the author approach physical love? First, visual and cliché: She sees him and tags him as “Handsome Man.” Holding hands, dates, kissing, the act of  “making love.”
Did it develop the characters’ personalities? The main character is annoyingly three characters: the author, the author in the novel, and the main character of the novel, so whose to say? She appears very manipulated into believing everyone’s the good guy even when they are confessed murderers.
Did it further the plot? Absolutely. The main character was already all mushy-gushy by the time she had to make the hard choices. And when some major truth-bombs explode in her lap, she’s helpless because she’s hooked.

I like how the questions made me look at the emotional and physical aspects separately. That was a good exercise.

RLW VII by Maria L. Berg 2023

Applying What I Learned

This week I did what I said I would, and formatted my novel draft and started reading it and . . . found a bunch of pages missing, and freaked out. Then I convinced myself that was okay, that I could keep reading and fill in the blanks better than before. Then I found the missing pages (whew), and I’m enjoying my draft. I mean, I actually enjoyed reading the opening scene, and can see how to improve it. So this week the things I’ve learned from RLW will be about brainstorming for my big picture edits and not specific examples of changes to the writing.

Format Brainstorm:

My MC is a jogger: I could use her running route, her fit-bit-type tracker, her running soundtrack, or zombie-run-type motivator
She was a detective: I could use her old cases and how she solved each one uniquely and have each unique connection have something to do with each chapter
She is obsessed with random killings: I could use examples from historic apparently random killings
She’s obsessed with an unsolved murder: I could use old local unsolved cases

The original unsolved case has to do with Magic the Gathering, so I made up my own card game. I could have each chapter start with one of the cards. I could tell the story on cards like the author of The Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry, did with The Family Arcana, I could have each chapter start with the rules of gameplay. I could have each chapter start with emails between the game company and Celia about her Master Deck art, or it could be fans sending email to Celia about her cards.

Like The Manual of Detection and The Madness of Crowds, I could find or create a non-fiction book that is part of the novel.

red herring vs. coincidence: One thing I thought the author did well was surprise the reader by having a person who was asked about one character dish out some dirt on another character. My novel takes place in a small town, so this might be a useful tool for disseminating information without relying on coincidences.

The magic formula: While writing my draft, I was inspired by an old unsolved double homicide, but I didn’t look very closely at the actual facts of the case and after the initial spark of inspiration, made up all the details. I don’t think I want to use any of the real details from that case, but during my format brainstorm, I thought doing some local historical research might add to my story. Research into old-west bank robberies might turn up some interesting characters for the “part him” part of the formula.

leading readers to meaning, showing them the way: As I read through my draft, I need to make sure I’ve defined my premise and proved it by the end of the book. At the moment, I think it’s We only See What We Want to See, or We Can Never Really Know Another Person, but before I start my re-write, I want to know exactly what my premise is and have a clear map to prove it step by step through the story.

romance: If Leo (in The Woman in the Library) is right, and every novel is a romance, then my MC might need a love interest. At the moment, she doesn’t seem open to the possibility, but that’s how love is, isn’t it? Shows up when you least expect it.

I Hope You’ll Join Me

This week I’m reading Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and will be sharing what I learn next week. What are you reading? How do you approach reading like a writer? What are you trying to learn as you read? I look forward to hearing about it in the comments.

Dialectic Thinking and the Study of Contradictory Abstractions

Hegelian Synthesis by Maria L. Berg 2023

Last week, while thinking about the first of my new calls to action “To find the truth in deceit and the deceit in truth; either deceive the truth, or unveil the deceit” (I now think reveal works better than unveil), the idea of deceiving truth, along with the blues songs I’ve been studying, got me thinking about cheaters and love triangles. I started thinking of imagery that represents a union of two wholes which made me think of the yin yang (itself a joining of opposites), and then an invisible triangle, the secret third party: the opposite of truth and the bringer of conflict.

Modernist Dialectic Thought

As I’ve mentioned I’m taking a course I found on coursera.org through Wesleyan University taught by Michael Roth called “The Modern and the Postmodern (Part 1)”. Last week, in the section called “From Enlightenment to Revolution,” we were assigned a bunch of Karl Marx to read, but for me the most interesting part of the week was the lectures on Karl Marx’s teacher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Though Wikipedia disagrees with itself whether Hegel actually used the terminology of Hegelian dialectic thought, I’m going to go ahead and talk about what excited me and how it inspired me this week.

Here’s how I understand Hegelian dialectics: every thought or idea (thesis) gives rise to its opposite (antithesis) and through conflict comes to synthesis. The whole process he called negation.

[Wikipedia says “For Hegel, the concrete, the synthesis, the absolute, must always pass through the phase of the negative, in the journey to completion, that is, mediation.” Seems similar enough to me.]

For Hegel this concept of an idea and its opposite coming to synthesis isn’t a fun thought experiment or art project (like me), it is his explanation of how the world works, and how the present reality interacts with history.

How does Hegelian philosophy change anything I’m doing? It brought up the idea that the image I’m searching for is the Synthesis, the end result of Negation. And when I find that, do I get to make up a new term: a word that means both truth and deceit for instance, and what would my process be for finding that term, making up that word, making a new term that means both and neither? That should be fun, and make for good image titles.

Does it really change how I think about my study of contradictory abstract nouns? A little. As I take my photographs, I may be seeing how the world works, actually documenting a more real reality than if I were taking photos of the mountain, lake, birds, and kitty. I’m getting close to photographing truth and reason, or at least seeing a path to documenting images of truth and reason.

How might this affect my process? If I am finding the truth in deceit and the deceit in truth, I come up with a shape or symbol that I think can embody both somehow. I can create it and it’s opposite (not exactly opposite, but the form upside down and backwards) at the same time. I can even make those two shapes or symbols interact, but is that an image of synthesis? Has my image gone through negation? How would I study that?

There is no simple symbol of truth and deceit, however, I was playing with the idea of two joined shapes=the yin yang and the secret triangle for the deceit. So if I take that symbol and its opposite (upside-down and backwards) will it make a synthesis of truth and deceit?

In the pictures I put in this post, I think the one with the shape upside down and backwards (the antithesis) creates the conflict Hegel talks about, and I think the one without the antithesis (top of post) creates a new form through synthesis. What do you think?

Talk About Synthesis:

The craziest thing happened last night. After free-writing about what I wanted to say about dialectic thinking. I went to bed and opened up Abstract Art: A Global History by Pepe Karmel, and right there in the introduction, right after saying “Critics argued that the abstract art made between 1915 and 1970 mattered deeply because its development unfolded according to laws of historical necessity. In contrast, even if individual painters and sculptors chose to go on making abstract art after 1970, their work did not—could not—belong to a meaningful historical narrative.” he says:

“The modernist theory of abstraction, with its reductive narrative explaining both the birth of abstraction and its ineluctable death, derived from Hegel, who tried to uncover an inner logic to history, replacing a chronicle of random events with a coherent narrative of significant actions. . . . modernists thought that, since abstraction had arrived at its essence, there was nothing meaningful left for modern artists to do. Painters might not have hung up their brushes, but ‘post-historical abstract painting’ was condemned to insignificance.”

So is Pepe saying that the process of Negation: thesis-antithesis-synthesis leads to the end of abstract painting? Or that “modernists” thought that? I don’t think that’s a reasonable conclusion. As I see it, the synthesis, that residual after the conflict lives on, or as the circles within circles of history, the process repeats and repeats.

What I’m finding inspirational for creating abstract art, Pepe Karmel sees as the end of abstract art. Though we obviously are in thesis and antithesis with no synthesis in sight, it’s still fun to see the connection.

Negation by Maria L. Berg 2023

Next Steps

I’m going to continue to dive into the philosophy of dialectic thought while I move to my second call to action “To find the ugliness in beauty and the beauty in ugliness; uglify the beautiful, or beautify the ugly.”

Another statement that came up in The Modern and the Postmodern class, “beauty hides the truth” is in stark contrast to Keat’s statement in Ode on a Grecian Urn “Beauty is truth, truth beauty . . .” so there’s a lot to explore there.

How to Read Like a Writer (RLW): A Novel Can Take Many Forms

Reading Like a Writer IV by Maria L. Berg 2023

I did it! I put together all my 4theWords files from NaNoWriMo into one file, formatted it into one double-spaced draft and did a preliminary spell-check to make my novel draft readable. Then I saved it as a PDF so I’m ready for my first read through on my tablet. So, my focus this week is the big picture, the large developmental edits. As I read as a writer this week, I’ll be thinking about all the possibilities for the best way to tell my story, and The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill turned out to be a great book to study as an example.

Choosing the Novels

Now that I’ve read the three novels I had from the library, I had to decide what’s next. One part of learning to read like a writer, is to learn how I want to process different formats. This week for my coursera.org course, “The Modern and Postmodern,” we’re reading Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert. I’ve downloaded it from Project Gutenberg for kindle, so this will be my first experiment taking notes with kindle. If that doesn’t work for me, I can download it as a PDF and try it with a PDF editing program.

Next week I’m going to read A Widow for One Year by John Irving. I’ve had the paperback for a long time but never gotten past the first chapter or two. The paperback isn’t in any condition to pass along to another reader, so I’m going to see how highlighting and writing notes in the book itself compares to using the post-its.

While looking at my book lists I saw that The Hours by Michael Cunningham is about another book on my lists Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, so it’ll be fun to read them in tandem.

There are so many things to think about while considering a book list for RLW. (I’m trying to get used to using the abbreviation. It’s going to take a while).

Reading Like a Writer

The novel I read, and will be studying this week, is the The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill. It is a meta-novel about writers discussing writing their novels within a novel. It is also partly an epistolary novel using the letters from a correspondence with another author reading and responding to the chapters as they are written.

It reminded me a bit of The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood which has a novel within the novel as well as newspaper reports.

This got me thinking about different elements that can be used in a novel. Last week’s novel, The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny, used lines from a poem written by one of the characters in different ways throughout the novel.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski tells a second story using footnotes and adds to the story with the graphic presentation of the text. Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix is a novel made to look like an IKEA furniture catalogue.

I did a quick search for “unique novel formats” and found S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. S. It’s a book about two readers checking out a book called Ship of Theseus from the library. The description says it comes with 22 inserts. I just requested it from the library. I wonder how they deal with all the parts. Should be interesting.

Illuminae files by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff is is a teen sci-fi trilogy told through “hacked documents”: emails, maps, medical reports, interviews.

Can you think of any other novels in unique forms that really added to the telling of the story?

Reading Like a Writer V by Maria L. Berg 2023

The Questions for this week:

My main focus is structure, so I think I’ll focus on the questions inspired by How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James N. Frey:

What is the novels premise?
Has the author proved the premise?
How is the premise made clear to the reader?
What is the main character’s premise?
Do I relate to the character? How?
Was the character likeable? Why?
How do the main characters grow from pole to pole?
Is there rising conflict? Is it ever static, or does it jump?
Does the story begin at the correct place?
Do the events of the story grow out of one another?
Is there poetic justice or irony?
What is the narrative voice?
Would it have been better if told from another viewpoint?
Does each scene have a rising conflict?
Were flashbacks used? Were they absolutely necessary?
Is there foreshadowing? How is it used?
Is the dialogue in conflict? Does it further characterizations? Does it further the story? Is it fresh and colorful?
Is the writing sensual? What are my favorite sensory descriptions? Is there a good balance of all the senses?

And some inspired by Plot versus Character by Jeff Gerke:

What is the ordinary world? How is it presented?
What is the inciting incident? When, where in the book does it occur?
What is the MC’s knot (problem)?
What will force her to face it, finally take action to unravel it?
What is her old way? What is her new way?
What decision does the MC have to make at the moment of truth?
What is the cost? What is the gain?
What are the steps of the escalation: the ever larger bombs?
When is the villain introduced?
What is the first conflict/barrier the villain causes for the MC?
What is the main conflict? Man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self, man vs. tech, man vs. society, or man vs. the supernatural / fate?
What are the essential scenes for the genre?
What is the plot structure?
Map the main scenes

This is the first novel since I started this study that had any romance and sex in it, so I can look at those questions from the original list:

Is there romance, sex scenes?
How did the author approach emotional love?
How did the author approach physical love?
Did it develop the characters’ personalities?
Did it further the plot?

Time to Experiment

I’ve narrowed my questions to plot and structure. That doesn’t mean I won’t also learn about characterization, pacing, and emotion, but I want my reading to help me learn the things I need for my novel revision as I do the work.

Do you have a technique for reading like a writer? I would love to hear about it in the comments.

The Week in Review: Reading, Writing, and Abstraction

Spotlight by Maria L. Berg 2023

How was your week? Did you try reading like a writer? I really enjoyed applying the things I learned from The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny to my short story. This week I’ll be talking about The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill.

I’m enjoying my coursera.org course “The Modern and the Postmodern” through Wesleyan University. I really like how my study of contradictory abstractions overlaps with philosophy. This week’s section “From Enlightenment to Revolution” talked about Hegel’s dialectic thinking. I’ll talk more about that on Tuesday.

This week’s images were inspired by painters from the Northwest School, that emerged in the late 1930’s, especially the work of Mark Tobey. In Modernism in the Pacific Northwest by Patricia Junker, there’s a photograph of lights on US Navy ships in Elliott Bay during Fleet Week, July 1937, on the opposite page from Tobey’s painting “White Night, 1942. One can see how the overlapping spotlights could be the energy Tobey tries to capture in the painting. I played with creating the overlapping spotlights with light-forming photography and enjoyed the results.

Enlighten by Maria L. Berg 2023

Using drum beats to create poetic lines

This week’s rhythm I’ve been playing with is: one, two, three and, four. It made me think of the cha-cha, but when I looked up some cha-cha videos it turns out the cha-cha is actually next week’s beat: one, two, three, four and.

The first lines that came to mind for one, two, three and, four:

she is always late; she has fifty dates

sweet treat healthy fruit; brown round wrinkled suit

time to go-to bed; Mis-ter sleepy head

time to go-to work; he’s a soda jerk

Here’s some of a draft of a poem idea I wrote the other day:

a triangle from two connected points
the unknown third point
making invisible lines
of connection
to future hurt
to future revelations
the invisible lines
of secrets and lies
one of those fine lines
is the line between love and hate
a triangle of love
betrayed and hidden
where the deceit in truth
is found, where the
haunting blues find soul
where song after song
find life’s conflict
the wandering eye caught
attention grabbed by the new
and in motion
the yearning flesh aching
knowing there’s a good ache
that frees the mind
from form

Let’s see what happens when I try to put it into the rhythm:

the third unknown point
joins in unseen lines
to a future hurt
that your secrets hide

where the haunting blues
find life’s conflict caught
ache in yearning flesh
moves the wand’ring eye

*I really like how the rhythm helped me condense the ideas. I think this is an intriguing opening.

Radiating by Maria L. Berg 2023

And the Real Work Begins

Today’s the big day! I’m putting the first draft of my novel I wrote in November into a PDF and I’m going to read it through on my tablet as if it’s someone else’s e-book. From now on, as I’m reading like a writer, learning and writing rhythms, and studying contradictory abstractions it is all toward my novel revision.

Here’s to an Exciting Adventure!