The Quarantine Quill

We've inherited our faith in revision from the Modernists, but there really is such a thing as too much rewriting. In this final episode of the Quarantine Quill, we look at how writing workshops are designed to keep suggesting revisions, and why it's important to know when to walk away.

Mentioned in this episode: Hilma Wolitzer, The Company of Writers: Fiction Workshops and Thoughts on the Writing Life (2001); Hannah Sullivan, The Work of Revision (2013); Lydia Davis, "Revising One Sentence" in Essays: One (2019).

Music: Carole Cassier.

The Quarantine Quill is a creative writing podcast hosted by Anna Polonyi with the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking. The podcast will be bringing you a daily writing tip and prompt for as long as PICT's creative writing events are on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic. For more details on the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking, please visit parisinstitute.org.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who hate spoilers, and those who couldn’t care less. The term itself, spoiler, suggests that by knowing how something ends, the experience of it has been ruined. But is this really the case? This episode looks at reverse narratives, and how telling a story backwards can side-step our need for closure.

Mentioned in this episode: dir. Chrisopher Nolan, Memento (2000); Martin Amis, Time's Arrow (1991); Sarah Waters, The Night Watch (2006); Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind (2018); Andrew Craig, "Closure and the Novel", Sydney Review of Books (October 2019).

Music: Carole Cassier.

The Quarantine Quill is a creative writing podcast hosted by Anna Polonyi with the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking. The podcast will be bringing you a daily writing tip and prompt for as long as PICT's creative writing events are on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic. For more details on the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking, please visit parisinstitute.org.

Part of the joy of reading, especially short stories, is wondering where the story is eventually going to land. American novelist and short story writer Ethan Canin teaches that leaping to unexpected places at the end of a story can disarm the reader's intelligence and engage their emotions.

Mentioned in this episode: Dino Buzzati, tr. by Lawrence Venuti, "The Falling Girl" in Sleepless Nights: Selected Stories(1983).

Music: Carole Cassier

The Quarantine Quill is a creative writing podcast hosted by Anna Polonyi with the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking. The podcast will be bringing you a daily writing tip and prompt for as long as PICT's creative writing events are on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic. For more details on the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking, please visit parisinstitute.org.

If fiction is a "vivid and continuous dream" as John Gardner puts it, finishing a book or story is like waking up from that dream: do you prefer a loud, one-off alarm or a gentle crescendo of snoozes? This episode looks at Raymond Carver and Alice Munro's signature endings and the speeds at which we exit a story.

Mentioned in this episode: Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981); Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness (2009).

Music: Carole Cassier

The Quarantine Quill is a creative writing podcast hosted by Anna Polonyi with the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking. The podcast will be bringing you a daily writing tip and prompt for as long as PICT's creative writing events are on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic. For more details on the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking, please visit parisinstitute.org.

"And they lived happily ever after." But what did they learn? As strict lockdown measures are due to ease here in France, we'll be dedicating the last episodes of the Quarantine Quill to endings: today we look at insight, and why we should resist the urge to end on them.

Mentioned in this episode: Charles Baxter, "Against Epiphanies," Burning Down the House (2008).

Music: Carole Cassier

The Quarantine Quill is a creative writing podcast hosted by Anna Polonyi with the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking. The podcast will be bringing you a daily writing tip and prompt for as long as PICT's creative writing events are on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic. For more details on the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking, please visit parisinstitute.org.

Writer and Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate Natalia Reyes walks us through her quest for understanding how dialogue works, starting with a workshop with Mitchell Jackson at the Napa Valley's Writing Conference.

Mentioned in this episode: Mitchell Jackson, Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family (2019); Charles Johnson, The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling (2016); Seymour Chapman, Reading Narrative Fiction (1998).

Music: Carole Cassier

The Quarantine Quill is a creative writing podcast hosted by Anna Polonyi with the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking. The podcast will be bringing you a daily writing tip and prompt for as long as PICT's creative writing events are on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic. For more details on the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking, please visit parisinstitute.org.

The last in our four-part series on dialogue, this episode looks at how to make your characters sound distinct from each other by keeping an ear out for recurring speech patterns, shifts in voice, and favorite sentence structures.

Mentioned in this episode: Hilma Wolitzer, The Company of Writers: Fiction Workshops and Thoughts on the Writing Life (2001).

Music: Carole Cassier

The Quarantine Quill is a creative writing podcast hosted by Anna Polonyi with the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking. The podcast will be bringing you a daily writing tip and prompt for as long as PICT's creative writing events are on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic. For more details on the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking, please visit parisinstitute.org.

How to incorporate silence into written dialogue? To write "an awkward pause" is, well, awkward at best. In the third episode in our four-part series on dialogue, we look at the power of the pause and the many functions it can serve.

Mentioned in this episode: "Silence is Golden for Whales as Lockdown Reduces Ocean Noise" in The Guardian; Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone (2016).

Featured guest: Eliott Gorton in New Orleans, USA.

Music: Carole Cassier

The Quarantine Quill is a creative writing podcast hosted by Anna Polonyi with the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking. The podcast will be bringing you a daily writing tip and prompt for as long as PICT's creative writing events are on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic. For more details on the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking, please visit parisinstitute.org.

Infamously irritating, halfalogues are the half of a conversation you overhear when someone near you is talking on their phone. Researchers have shown that these partial interactions are much harder to tune out than two-way conversations, confirming what writers have always known: omission in dialogue is more powerful than saying it all.

Mentioned in this episode: Galván VV, "The Effects of Cell Phone Conversations on the Attention and Memory of Bystanders" in PLoS ONE (2013).

Music: Carole Cassier

The Quarantine Quill is a creative writing podcast hosted by Anna Polonyi with the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking. The podcast will be bringing you a daily writing tip and prompt for as long as PICT's creative writing events are on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic. For more details on the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking, please visit parisinstitute.org.

"If you're a good writer, these days, you pay attention to the way that people don't pay attention." Distraction is something we all have to contend with, now more than ever as we refresh newsfeeds and check notifications. This week's series on dialogue opens with a look at the various forms of 'unlistening' Charles Baxter notes in his book The Art of Subtext. 

Mentioned in this episode: Charles Baxter, The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot (2007); Tony Kushner, Angels in America (1991); La Cité de la Peur (1994).

Featured guest: Eszter Polonyi in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Music: Carole Cassier

The Quarantine Quill is a creative writing podcast hosted by Anna Polonyi with the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking. The podcast will be bringing you a daily writing tip and prompt for as long as PICT's creative writing events are on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic. For more details on the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking, please visit parisinstitute.org.