I'm Eating an Apple

  I: Introductory Introduction:  The writing book about writing books: Murder your Darlings, and other gentle writing advice from Aristotle to Zinsser , is a top contender for the brim-full genre. Packed with advice and the author Roy Peter Clark’s personal experiences, it’s a thunderbolt of guidance to help you improve your craft. This blog post will be taking a few points from the book, as copy pasting the entirety of it wouldn’t be practical, and expanding on those advice points.  II: Cutting Clutter Murder your darlings. Erase your friends. Scratch out your mother. That’s what Clark and many authors did to their writings; beat it down, until everything unnecessary was demolished. But how do you determine if a sentence is clutter? Understanding the definition that the author is using is crucial for that.  ---- CLUTTER  /CL-UTT-ER/ Noun, (writing context) All the stuff that doesn’t pertain to the ideas of the text. ---- Let’s take a look at an example.  “...

House of Stairs by William Sleator is possibly one of my favorite books of all time. Five sixteen-year-old orphans are dropped in some sort of place made entirely of stairs. No walls, no ceiling, no floor, just endless white flights of stairs and landings. The book is told in limited third person, and each chapter switches to a different character. I have read it twice now, and on the second read-through, I noticed that each character falls into a distinct stereotype, and each character has something that they long for. Peter is the first character that the reader meets when he is dropped off on the stairs by himself. He is the prime example of “the quiet kid”. Most of his time is spent sitting on one of the flights of stairs in a trance, lost in his own world, not paying attention to anything that’s going on around him. When the story is told from his perspective, the reader learns that he had no friends at the orphanage except for someone named Jasper, who he regarded as an older br...

    The Giver  is written in the view of an 11-year-old boy named Jonas. He lives in a society very different than ours that has cut down and removed all negative emotions like fear and pain. All the families consist of a mother and father with one girl and one boy. Each year from ages 1-12 the children have a ceremony in December for turning a year older. Jonas is reaching his year 12 ceremony where the elders choose a job for his adulthood. He receives the honor of being the next Receiver of Memory. The Receiver keeps all the memories of life before the community to keep the negative emotions from the rest of the Community. The Giver was the Receiver of Memory before Jonas and transfers every memory to him. To not spoil too much, I will just leave the quick summary there.      The setting gives the story its uniqueness from any other story. The grey no colored world with only some emotions controlled and governed strictly differs from others I have read. ...

       The amount of imagination and magic in every page of The Keepers book series is comparable to that of the beloved Harry Potter books. It may seem far fetched, but trust me, it is true. The Keepers is a thrilling series filled with action and wonder. If you haven’t heard of it, it is about a group of people (the majority are ages 12-17)  named the Wardens who all have objects called Tan’ji that give them powers and their struggle against the original makers of the Tan’ji, the Riven.   Since I enjoy both series so much, I thought, why not see how The Keepers characters would fit into the Harry Potter universe? Without further ado, here are the main characters of The Keepers as I see they would be sorted at Hogwarts. I haven’t finished the series, so my opinions on these may change by the end.   Just a note: if there are words you don’t know, there’s a glossary at the end- an idea I borrowed from the books. Words with asterisks have definit...