I’ve been reading about Gustave Flaubert and his writing method. “What a bitch of a thing prose is!” he wrote to his friend and lover, Louise Colet. “It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo.” And redo he did.
Flaubert was a definite “basher,” taking up to a week to produce a single page. He once remarked that for the first 125 pages of Madame Bovary, he actually wrote 500 pages. But this constant revision was required to achieve the style for which he aimed.
“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”
In reading an analysis of the style he adopted for Madame Bovary, I realized that I, too, have a style. (more…)
As a music major, I never really listened to music for the lyrics; I could rarely understand the singers anyway. (That’s why, during the final seasons of BSG, I missed the fun when they started quoting “All Along the Watchtower,” but that’s beside the point, really.)
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 