Quote:
Originally Posted by Zelandi
Sunlite - Good idea. I'm reading a page/blog about writing fiction already (it has good points but I'm getting lost in the sub-pages and I'll google around for more examples anyhow). Do you have any specific blogs/sites/books in mind?
Telling rather than showing, it's a kind of thing that can make a story feel flat and a bit distant?
I recognize the dialog issue, I think that's one of the most annoying thing I can think of. At the moment.
Dr. Drib - Did you mean any specific book written by Iser or Fish?
I googled and found a lot of academic texts and what seems like meta-analyses on the theory (I'll check the references and see if I can manage to read through the sources... although I'd hope for a light version in a blog or something  )
I found some wiki explaining the theory a bit. Sounds a lot like the communication theories we've had lectures about in school - how communication never is just one-way. The listener interprets what's said, hopefully but rarely in a way close to what the talker intended. We applied it to text books, but I never thought about it with fiction. That's interestiong.
I'll investigate this theory further.
Btw, I'm not familiar with the term ''technical books''.. it makes me think of IKEAs manuals or something. But does it mean scientific/academic texts? |
You should look at
"The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response," by Wolfgang Iser.
Secondarily, you might look at
"The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett."
With regard to Stanley Fish, you may wish to examine
"Is There A Text in the Class," a well-known volume in the evolution of literary criticism and Reader-Response criticism in particular.
I have all of these, but unfortunately they're in storage at the moment.
Stanley Fish also has a lay book for popular consumption, entitled "
How To Write A Sentence," which (I just checked) is also available in a Kindle edition. However, this book is not primarily concerned with Reader-Response criticism, but nevertheless should be useful in untangling and appreciating sentence structures from a number of different writers.