“We do not write to be understood. We write to understand.” C.S. Lewis

I always enjoy reading Poets and Writers. It’s interesting to see what writings from other genres are doing...

My favorite article in the Sept/Oct issue is titled The Unreliable Narrator by J.T. Bushnell. He writes… ‘you have to know not only who your characters are but also who they pretend to be, not only what they care about but also what they say they care about, not only what ideas they live by but also how those ideas are false……And you have to signal these disparities to the reader without revealing them to the character or straining creditability by making the characters to blind….their unrecognized truth….Understanding my characters’ secrets, illusions, and pretenses lets me see clearly how they’ll act, what they’ll say, how the action of the story challenges them….”

Bushnell uses the examples of Salinger’s Cather In the Rye and Wolff’s The Mickey Mouse Club to show how the ‘factor of unreliable narration builds a disparity between what characters believe and what is actually the case.”
And lastly – Note From the Editor writes… ‘Whatever you choose to write about today, dig a little deeper and make it matter - to yourself, to all of us.’

Well tomorrow I'm off to the beach for some deep thinking....and tanning.