Words of uncommon shape
Subtitle: how writers create vividness in language and story
Publisher: Cassandrine Publications
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Pasadena, CA
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9780991170227
Table of contents: label: 1
title: Cognitive Collision
pagenum: The key literary principles of Contrast and Coherence | 1; label: 2
title: A Megalosaurus in WC1
pagenum: Creating vividness in the face of sensory satiation: the necessity of change—and change of change.  How Dickens made 500 words on “it was foggy and muddy” lively | 10; label: 3
title: Is He Still the Lone Ranger If He Has a Faithful Companion?
pagenum: Basic sources of Contrast, including characters, motifs, styles, mood, tempo | 21; label: 4
title: E pluribus unum, ex uno plures
pagenum: “Dramatic unity” and its varying interpretations; “true to life” and “making sense” as historically changing figments of our brain’s constant demand for Coherence | 40; label: 5
title: Le Mot injuste
pagenum: How writers make language itself (which, to be intelligible, must be known—dull) vividly new.  Specificity and the explosion of information; the “visual” factor | 61; label: 6
title: Strange Bedfellows
pagenum: Imagery: creating new environs for old words.  Analogies and visualizing. clichés and taboos.  The literal and the imaginary. Non-abstractness. Mining dialects | 78; label: 7
title: Strange Visitor from another Planet
pagenum: Characters and characterization.  Matching the reader’s fantasy of self.  Setting up lively foils | 92; label: 8
title: The Familiarity Quotient
pagenum: Genre fiction: expressing and elaborating the reader’s fantasies. Advice from editors of genre fiction.  Cliché and taboo again | 103; label: 9
title: The Sourdough Starter
pagenum: Plot: What it is in actual practice, as opposed to the incomplete definitions so often quoted. Construction of viable plots. Twain | 111; label: 10
title: How Plots Thicken
pagenum: How writers renew the story by “solve and reshape” and by “revelation.”  Problems (of time, location, characters, fantasy, etc.) inherent in each method | 120; label: 11
title: Frankenstein Meets—Hardly Anybody
pagenum: The main character: difficulties and advantages inherent in isolating or socializing one’s protagonist | 135; label: 12
title: Replacing Divots
pagenum: Vacuum generated by isolating one’s characters so they can’t talk; use of empathetic natural phenomena (like weather) instead of dialogue to obtain newness/vividness that is still coherent | 145; label: 13
title: Rosebuds
pagenum: Genesis of second levels, including dreams, prophetic events, and especially symbols: making the abstract concrete | 154; label: 14
title: Bugs of Uncommon Shape
pagenum: Literary humor—intentional and unintentional—from the viewpoint of Contrast and Coherence | 168; label: 15
title: Muggles, Hobbits, and Meaningful Ghosts
pagenum: Interesting sources of Contrast and Coherence in Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings; Dostoevsky’s stunning innovations in plotting.  Endings | 187; label: Bibliography
pagenum: 206