Sunday, May 17, 2009

Still retyping "Craphound"

I'm still enjoying my project of retyping Cory Doctorow's short story Craphound. The fact that he made this story available as a text file makes it easy to analyze. And I enjoy rereading the story. In fact, the hard thing is to not get caught up in the story when I'm trying to just type a paragraph.

I'm typing notes and ideas about it right into my file. As is my habit, I preface notes with xxx, so that they can be found easily later. And I'm putting them on separate lines; they can easily be grepped out later, too. 

So I guess I just want to recommend this sort of project. You might not think retyping someone else's story is worthwhile. But it forces you to look at the text carefully, and I'm learning a lot. I'm interested in how Doctorow breaks up the story into scenes and sequels, and gratified to learn that he does seem to be using that structure, a la Dwight V. Swain's Techniques of the Selling Writer

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:34 PM

    Man, not another book with advice about writing! Okay, I'll wish list this, but then I'm drawing a red ink line in the sand. If I read all these books I'll never have time to write anything!

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  2. Anonymous4:37 PM

    Btw, Aaron, this is Doug. Blogger won't let me log in with my google ID from the iPod for some reason.

    ReplyDelete