Word: novelizations
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...least one other example," he says, noting that the impulse to write fiction is hardly uncommon among people used to writing in code. "I've run into lots and lots of people in the software world who say, 'Yeah I used to write in college and have a novel in the drawer at home...
With Sawtelle now at number 6 on the New York Times Bestseller's List (and number 2 on Amazon), Wroblewski, a veteran programmer, may be the first software dude to hit it big. (And with a debut novel, at that.) The book itself has absolutely nothing to do with technology - it's a Hamlet-like tale about a mute boy who raises a special (and fictional) breed of dogs on a farm in Wisconsin. Yet Wroblewski says that being a software writer helped him craft the novel and gave him some insight into the mechanics of breaking down the project...
...program that allowed him to work, mainly, from his home in Colorado. Why pursue an MFA? Because he as an engineer, he was vexed by the structure of narrative fiction. He was especially interested in what he called "middle structure" - "at the bottom level of a novel are sentences and scenes and paragraphs," he says. "Tiny particles of the story. At the top level is the easy-to-summarize plot - it's got some twist, a climax and a denouement." But at the middle level, he says, when you look at a book, chapter by chapter...
...fascinating problem for a software engineer. "In the software world, we have elaborate, elaborate software mechanisms for handling structure. Think of Object Oriented programming for instance - anything that divides a problem into well-orchestrated parts. But obviously that level of modularity is not desirable in a novel. And yet there had to be something, right? It doesn't just happen by accident, that's for sure...
Travel writing was lucrative, but novels were what serious literary men were expected to produce, and from the start Twain longed to be taken seriously, to be regarded as more than "merely" a humorist. So by 1873 he had rolled out his first novel, The Gilded Age, which he co-wrote with a Connecticut journalist, Charles Dudley Warner. With that book's title, Twain gave the post--Civil War era, a time of boundless greed and opportunism, the name it still has and that it shares, in some quarters, with the era we seem to be willy-nilly emerging from...