Janet Cameron

This controversial philosopher was born in the Czech Republic in Prossnitz, which is now known as Prostějov . Although Jewish by birth, Husserl converted to Catholicism in 1887.  His Jewish origins exposed him to persecution by the Nazis, and towards the end of his life, excluded him from German academic life. He developed a philosophy that was, basically, a systematic analysis of experiences, in other words, Phenomenology.  He sees the world not as an actuality, but as an actuality-phenomenon.  He acknowledges that he exists, but claims that all that is “not-I” is phenomena. READ MORE

Copyright: Janet Cameron One of the first exercises we undertake when we begin to write is the art of creating three-dimensional characters, perhaps a composite of people we know, a little from ourselves and something more from our imagination. Ideally, the result will be a character the reader can identify with. The human personality is a mish-mash of ambiguities and idiosyncrasies that make our characters real and sometimes endearing. Involve your Reader Most writing tutors advise against hijacking a whole, real person as a model for a central character, as it seldom works. If you have a specific motivation for your central protagonist and s/he is based on a real person, this might inhibit you from developing your character in the way you have planned. Whatever method you use to people your fiction, remember that without that all-important sense of recognition, your reader may not become emotionally involved. We need at least one character to root for. Also, remember, the rea...

Copyright: Janet Cameron To use foreshadowing in your story means, simply, to hint at some drama to come. Foreshadowing means to indicate or show in advance a future happening and the use of a foreshadowing scene can greatly increase tension. It’s a matter of helping the reader make the right connections through suggestion, sometimes direct and sometimes subtle. Symbols and omens are also useful devices. Chekhov’s Gun is a well-known example of foreshadowing. In an article on the New World Encyclopedia website, the (unnamed) author quotes the words Chekhov wrote in a letter in 1889: “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter, it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” To draw the reader's attention to the drama hinted at by foreshadowing, references to the relevant object may be repeated in diverse ways. Example of Foreshadowing from Author, Stephen King: This ...

If you are a writer, cause and effect is a major source of conflict and interest.  However, one philosopher denied we could ever be sure about cause and effect.  Did you once believe there could only be white swans: Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons More than that, he also said we were just a bunch of perceptions and there was no such thing as "self." What's more he was amazingly stoical about no one liking his book: "As a child prodigy, David Hume entered University at the tender age of eleven years; and after graduation, began to follow the theories of John Locke. His good-natured humour reaches out to us from beyond the grave. According to Jeremy Harwood in Philosophy, 100 Great Thinkers, Hume wrote his first and chief philosophical work A Treatise on Human Nature in France in the mid-1730s and published it when he was 28 years old, noting that “…it fell dead-born from the press.”   Read more

I don't usually repost jokey material from Facebook, but I can't resist sharing this.  Reminds me of my mother. She always said I should do what she told me to do, not copy what she did!!! Also, I reckon people should stop bossing writers about.  D.H. Lawrence made a style out of using superfluous words and his prose sounds like poetry. So there!

Ezra Pound said, “Good writers are those who keep the language efficient.   When you need to consider what works for you and what will appeal to your intended readership, think of the four questions George Orwell says you must ask about your style.      a .   What am I trying to say?                       b .   What words will express it?   c .   What image will make it clearer?         d .   Is this image fresh enough to   have an effect? Here is a checklist for the most common fiction faults:    Ezra Pound by Alvin Langdon Coburn a.    Beginning too slow?   Have you hooked? b.   Character/s are not sufficiently rounded.   We don’t care what happens to  them. c.   The story has no shape.   A series of episodes isn’t a story. ...

  Here is a portrait of Georg Hegel by Jakob Schlesinger in 1831. Image by FreeArt1. This was a man with a lot of fine ideas - but these didn't extend to respect for the female gender... Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) developed and brought together new and exciting ideas that flowed through the Romantic period. In Sophie’s World , Jostein Gaardner describes this outstanding, systematic thinker as a “legitimate child of Romanticism.”  However, Georg Hegel was not everybody’s favourite person – far from it.  Read more...