From Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor

When in Doubt It’s from Shakespeare….

-30- Writers find themselves engaged in a relationship with older writers; of course, that relationship plays itself out through the texts, the new one emerging in part through earlier texts that exert influence on the writer in one way or another.

This harks back to something Gardner says in the Art of Fiction where he talks about there really only being one book ever written and it’s being added to every time a writer sits down to write. … At least, I think that’s Gardner, I’m beginning to get confused between the two authors, as their subjects so occupy the same sphere of knowledge.

…Or the Bible

-31- The naming of a character is a serious piece of business in a novel or play. A name has to sound right for a character—but it also has to convey whatever message the writer want to convey about the character of the story.

This is something that I find very interesting about writing and that ties into John Gardner’s idea about writers learning about their characters as they go along rather than having everything meticulously planned out prior to writing word one. I have a very long list of first names and surnames to reference when looking for a character’s name but I very rarely use it because as soon as a character is introduced I typically know their name and it’s usually not on my list. I find this fascinating and have no idea how/why it happens. Occasionally, I can’t figure out the character’s name and it bothers the hell out of me. But when s/he finally tells me their name I think, ‘Ah-ha! Of course.’

-32- Even people that aren’t Biblical scholars can sometimes recognize a biblical allusion. Forster uses something he calls the ‘resonance test’. If I hear something in a text that seems to be beyond the scope of the story’s or poem’s immediate dimensions, if it resonates outside itself, I start looking for allusions to older and bigger texts.

If me, this is usually down to rhythm. Ideas that are from somewhere else seem to have a particular rhythm that doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the style. Unfortunately, I’m still at the point where I can identify the rhythm but not what it represents. Le sigh.