In a previous post, I gave a couple of rules of thumb for telling a story. One of them was: Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. In the particular case of non-fiction, there are two important cases to distinguish. The first is, stories intended to communicate an experience; the… Read more »
Posts By: Charles Reid
Rules of Thumb for Telling a Story
Three rules of thumb, when you are telling a story: Don’t tell us… take us! Start with your message, and find a story that fits: not the other way around. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
The Car Habit
Cars seem to bring out some of the worst qualities of a human being. The obvious bad qualities: impatience, irrationality, anger, I-am-the-center-of-the-universe syndrome; but also some slightly more subtle qualities. One is the feeling of immortality, which can be caused by irrational misunderstanding of how statistics work (“Everyone says that there’s a high likelihood of… Read more »
To help you rationalize material detachment…
I have to admit: I inherited the packrat gene. It isn’t bad enough to inspire a reality television show, and it’s not even photo-worthy, but sometimes I find it hard to give and/or throw things away. Part of it is because I sometimes see things as symbols of experiences. I keep a jacket that’s too… Read more »
Paradise Lost Book 1
A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible Serv’d onely to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes That comes to all; but torture without end Still urges, and… Read more »
Coding… Artistically
If you write code, one of the things you discover quickly is that there is a significant amount of personal style that goes into your code. Most of the time it’s pedantic, a matter of a few spaces or parentheses; but more often than you might expect, it can play a significant role in code… Read more »
Longreads: The Invasion of the Buses
An excellent read that discusses the phenomena of economic stratification in San Francisco, what effect this is having on the city’s makeup, and the role of wealthy tech companies in the whole process. It is an excellent, in-depth treatment of a complex issue, one around which most everyone seems to have an opinion. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary London… Read more »
Camus’ The Plague: Fragment
One of the themes of the novel is that Oran, quarantined from the outside world, becomes an absurd prison, with, as the Jesuit priest Father Paneloux puts it, God “striking at random, swinging up again in a shower of drops of blood, and spreading carnage and suffering” with no sense of justice. In this situation,… Read more »
Camus’ The Plague: Escape
But then the sound of hurried footsteps came again. Rieux was already halfway down the stairs, and when he stepped out into the street two men brushed past him. They seemed to be on their way to one of the town gates. In fact, what with the heat and the plague, some of our fellow… Read more »
Camus’ The Plague: Abstraction
“Oh, I know it’s an absurd situation, but we’re all involved in it, and we’ve got to accept it as it is.” “But I don’t belong here.” “Unfortunately, from now on you’ll belong here, like everybody else.” [...] “You’re using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of abstractions.”… Read more »