In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning – and literary origins – of a well-known phrase ‘All that glitters is not gold’. Who gave us that famous expression? William Shakespeare? Thomas Gray? That prolific but elusive author, ‘Anon’? Many people attribute the phrase […]
The story of Philomela is well-known. And one of the most famous details of the myth of Philomela, her sister Procne, and King Tereus, is the fact that someone was turned into a nightingale. But who? And what is the meaning of this classical myth? Before we get to these […]
Learn when to use collage vs. college on with Grammar Rules from the Writer’s Digest editors, including a few examples of correct usages.
This week, let’s look at how collage and college differ. One of these words refers to something most people have probably created at one time or another. The other word refers to a group of people, a building, and/or an institution.
So let’s piece together the meanings of collage and college.
Collage is a noun that refers to something that is pieced together with diverse fragments. For instance, a collage could be an image that pieces together several clippings of images from magazines and newspapers. Or a collage film may piece together several film clips into one piece.
(Do writers need to go to college?)
College, on the other hand, is a noun that most often refers to a group of people for a purpose. For instance, a college could be a group of clergy living together or a group of electors, such as with the electoral college. Of course, it can also refer an educational or religious institution—or even the building that houses them.
Make sense?
Correct: He cut out some pictures to add to his collage for art class.
Incorrect: He cut out some pictures to add to his college for art class.
Correct: She was the first person in her family to attend college.
Incorrect: She was the first person in her family to attend collage.
A person could make a collage at college, but you can’t make a college at collage. If you need a way to keep these straight, associate the “a” in “collage” with “art,” since most collages require some form of creativity or artistic vision. Meanwhile, the “e” in “college” could be associated with education.
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No matter what type of writing you do, mastering the fundamentals of grammar and mechanics is an important first step to having a successful writing career.
Hamlet’s ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ speech to Ophelia is a memorable moment in a play full of memorable moments. Before we analyse his speech, here’s a reminder of the relevant section of the play, which is found in Act 3 Scene 1, not long after Hamlet’s famous ‘To be, […]
In the evenings, at night, there were long, drunken, anonymous parties where Paul lost his friends in the crowd, intentionally lost them, because everybody swooned over him with his swimmer’s torso and his long lashes. Nights when people handed him glasses full of clear or cloudy liquids that sometimes plunged him into extraordinary slowness where everything flowed as if underwater and where gestures were never quite completed, where they barely got nine-tenths of the way through. Nights on rooftops or in basements or at mansions or in abandoned metro stations. Nights full of smoke. Nights when he lost sight of his friends then found them again, but sometimes it wasn’t them, sometimes it was just his face, just his own reflection caught here or there. Nights when people tried in vain to get him into bed. Nights when he was obsessed with sex because at that time Paul was under a curse or a spell, he just couldn’t get rid of his virginity, every time, the girl disappeared or he left or someone showed up or they had to go; but stranger still, even when he had sex, and whatever the definition one gave the act, whether it was ordinary or pornographic or legal or none of the above, even when he inserted his genitals into someone else’s, even when he came with an uncontrollable shudder and the deed had finally been done, he thought, finally! – the next day or a few days later, it was as if nothing had happened. He was a virgin again, and resigned to it. It was a nightmare for him.
He slept little but slept well. Wherever he was, at the university or at the café, in an unknown house or at home, most of the time, just a few feet away would be a screen with flickering images of murders and investigations or funerals and tears or collapses and escapes or questions and answers, or only questions. And he, impervious to all these tragedies, slept peacefully. But that was before Amelia Dehr. That was before the hotel.
There wasn’t much money. His father had been blunt: the classes were fine, the rest wasn’t. He took the first job that came his way, distractedly, without even realising what he was agreeing to; indifferent or inattentive, because what he cared about was beginning a new life. Security monitoring – or rather, simply monitoring – during the off-hours at the hotel. In the evening; at night. He got bored there. And he offset that boredom by watching the women. Watching them at a remove. He looked for them. Sometimes he found them, sometimes he lost them. In any case, it was a game he played without any of them knowing. This one leaving her room and immediately disappearing, vanishing. Only to reappear, somewhere he hadn’t expected, as if by magic, slipping from one small window to another, almost at random. There were nine cameras and just as many squares on the monitoring screen, Paul’s screen. He waited for surprises; he could only anticipate their trajectories to a certain degree, because that didn’t account for random stops, sudden about-faces. He stared at all those bodies walking around and thinking thoughts he couldn’t see on the screens. He couldn’t see what had been forgotten in the rooms, on the nightstands, in the bathrooms; and he had no hope of seeing any lingering afterthoughts. And every so often came one of Paul’s favourite moments: rare, unexpected, evasive embraces in the emergency stairwells. All he ever saw was a fire door slowly – lazily – closing. He couldn’t really say that he enjoyed his job, which he didn’t think of as a job so much as an accident – less than that in fact, an incident, nothing more: a casual thing. But he could say that he enjoyed watching women. That he enjoyed looking down at them, playing at (or so he told himself ) looking down on them – and only at the hotel, only at night, was that possible for him, specifically because of the cameras, aimed so sharply downward that he was positioned high up, like the sun, like some god. If the warmer air – the sighs they exhaled as they redid their make-up in the elevator’s infinite mirrors, the seismic heat their warm flesh exuded as they stood in these empty, thoroughly ventilated spaces – and these exhalations rising up, accumulating beneath the ceiling, could see, then that vapour’s gaze would be the gaze Paul now had. So dreamed Paul.
When the women weren’t going in and out much any more or he wasn’t watching them much any more, he tried to study. He liked university but more than that he liked being a student, it exhilarated him, as did the pride his father felt – which didn’t keep him from being, deep down, a bit jealous of Paul, just a bit, in those little crannies of his heart of which he himself was unaware – actively, insistently unaware, in total denial. He would rather cut off his arm than admit it, because he was a good man, as proud of his goodwill as he was of his son, and a good man doesn’t envy his only child. But, at the construction site, he sometimes thought of that university and spat in the drywall, and sometimes pissed in the drywall, as people have always done – general hygiene notwithstanding – to bind the components, to (this Paul knew, even if his father didn’t) alter the pH, the acidity, the stability; and to (this his father knew, even if Paul didn’t) leave something of oneself in someone else’s space, in walls that construction workers laboured to build with no hope of ever living there. To secretly, silently spit or piss on other people’s comfort.
Their origins were modest and they took nothing for granted, especially not university education; they lived, had lived, Paul thought, as if nothing under their feet was certain. As if they were on water – but that image didn’t occur to him then; he would only think it much later, after finally meeting Amelia Dehr.
He tried to study but needed to take in far more than just his architecture classes, which sectioned off various eras, areas, and approaches. He had cut off – or so he thought – all contact with his past, which he didn’t think of as a past so much as an incident, more than that, an accident. The first eighteen years of his life had given him a particular body, and this body had a particular relationship with space, with others. He sensed that he didn’t quite belong. At the outset, he had observed. And imitated. First the clothes, which he stole. Then the haircut, which he’d had to adopt a whole new language just to describe, to ask for. It was a challenge he had never faced before, as complex as an international expedition, the greatest of conquests. Finally, he mastered the delicate art of talking. But this drained him. Some nights in the dorms he stayed in his bedroom, in the dark. Listening to the noises in the hallway, and all the other students’ chatter made him seasick; and if someone knocked on his door, he wouldn’t answer, the idea that it might be a mistake horrifying him just as much as the idea that it might not. He was terrified that it would never end and, even though it never did quite fade away, not really, still it only lasted two weeks, maybe three, and then it didn’t matter any more. He was already feeling at home, or so he thought. He had closer friends than ever, whom he loved intensely, for whom he sometimes thought he would have given an arm, a kidney, even. But sometimes he forgot their names. Or their faces. At three or four in the morning he would realise that all he retained of this friend, this guy or girl, was just a blurry shape. And sometimes it was just his face, just his own reflection caught here or there. Maybe deep down some part of him still lived in darkness. And maybe, worse still, he had gone on to think of this darkness, in bleak terms – all the bleaker given that he was an eighteen-year-old man with a swimmer’s torso, with long lashes, who now had a new self – as real life.
Image © Rookuzz
This is an extract from Night as It Falls, out now with Faber.
The post Night as It Falls appeared first on Granta.
Award-winning author Olga Grushin discusses what it meant to wade into a new genre and how she put her spin on the fairy tale retelling.
Olga Grushin was born in Moscow, spent her childhood in Prague, and moved to the United States at eighteen, becoming the first Russian citizen to receive an American college degree. She is the author of three previous novels. Her debut, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, earned her a place on Granta’s once-a-decade Best Young American Novelists list, and was one of the New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year. Both it and The Line were among The Washington Post’s Ten Best Books of the Year, and Forty Rooms was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of the Year. Grushin has published short stories and nonfiction in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Partisan Review, and elsewhere. She writes in English, and her work has been translated into sixteen languages. She lives outside Washington, D.C., with her two children.
In this post, Grushin discusses what it meant to wade into a new genre, how she put her spin on the fairy tale retelling, and more!
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Name: Olga Grushin
Literary agent: Warren Frazier at John Hawkins & Associates
Title: The Charmed Wife
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Release date: January 12, 2021
Genre: Literary, modern fantasy, fairy-tale retelling
Previous titles: The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2006); The Line (2010); Forty Rooms (2016)
Elevator pitch for the book: After thirteen years of marriage, Cinderella wants her Prince Charming dead. This subversive exploration of our romantic expectations is set in a world where time and place, fantasy and reality interweave in surprising ways—and nothing is quite what it seems.
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I loved fairy tales as a child—the more traditional, the better, all those princes, princesses, and happy couplings. Yet when I started reading them to my own daughter, she liked stories with tricksters and talking animals well enough, but she absolutely loathed any mention of princesses. “Stories with princesses are so boring,” she said. “They are really all the same story.”
At the same time, it so happened, I was going through a divorce. It was this confluence of my seven-year-old’s reaction and the end of my marriage that prompted me to take a closer look at the happily-ever-after tales we tell ourselves. Eventually, I knew that I wanted to write a book that would start as a predictable two-dimensional fantasy, with pastel-colored princesses, singing teapots, and waltzing mice, but would then grow in surprising, modern directions and arrive at a very different narrative in the end.
(A Word About Writing Princesses and Fairy Tales)
This is my fourth novel, and by now my overall approach has become more or less streamlined. It takes three to four years from the first glimmering of the idea to the finished volume that smells so delightfully of fresh ink: a year of gestation and research (or, if no actual research is required, reading “around the subject”); a year of intense daily writing to create the first draft; and one to two years devoted to revisions and the actual publishing process.
I always expect my initial idea to undergo countless changes in the planning stage—that is really what this stage is for. With every new novel, I start a thick notebook where, for months, I jot down themes, plot possibilities, personality sketches, useful facts, and so on. Then one day—and this day always comes without warning—I wake up and feel that I have accumulated enough material, so I read through the entire notebook and, out of the primordial flux of semi-thoughts and proto-characters, create an outline and begin to write. My outlines are never ironclad, though, but have plenty of breathing room to allow for organic changes that will inevitably happen in the actual writing stage.
With The Charmed Wife, I knew from the beginning that the figure of Cinderella would be at the heart of the story, and early on, I decided to weave in other familiar narratives as well, so Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Bluebeard, and many others began to find their way into my outline. Later still, the mouse theme emerged as its own subplot: I felt that I needed a sort of “downstairs” counterbalance of mouse wars and revolutions to the “upstairs” romance-obsessed life of the princess to cast her arc in a different light. But often, the precise connections between all these layers would occur to me only as I was writing, and I would get this satisfying sense of puzzle pieces locking into place. I think this feeling of the story pulling together and coming into final focus is one of my favorite things about writing novels.
I have published all my novels with the same publishing house, Putnam, but the editor who guided my first three books into life, the wonderful Marian Wood, retired a little while ago, and she passed away earlier this year—such a great loss in this year of losses. For this book, then, I have worked with an entirely new team. They are young, enthusiastic, and full of fresh ideas, and I am learning unexpected things. For example, I was always rather old-fashioned when it came to social media, but, at the gentle promptings of my new editor, Gabriella Mongelli, I took a timorous step into the realm of Twitter. I had believed myself intrinsically unsuited for it—the very thought of 280 characters seemed anathema to someone raised on Tolstoy’s War and Peace—yet now I am enjoying it thoroughly. This just goes to show that it is never too late to leave your comfort zone.
This entire book was really a surprise. I grew up in Moscow, reading nineteenth-century Russian classics, and when, still as a teenager, I declared I would be a writer, I imagined myself writing only “serious,” weighty books. In the early years of my career, I did not see fantasy as a respectable genre at all. But if I have learned anything in my subsequent decades of reading and writing, it is that genre divisions are arbitrary and literature is literature wherever it is found. This book was a great departure from my earlier novels (mostly set in Soviet Russia and dealing with totalitarian regimes and oppressed artists, among other things), and it was tremendous fun to write—the most fun, in truth, I had with any novel. I loved stepping out into the no man’s land between genres, playing with fantasy and reality, bending conventions, breaking my own past rules. I had this constant sense of adventure while I was working on it. “Can I really do this? Can I really go there, say that? Yes, I can—because why not, and who is going to stop me?”
This is not at all a traditional fairy-tale retelling, and readers who pick it up looking for a child-friendly Disney-style fantasy may find it quite unsettling. But if they approach it with open minds and few preconceived notions, I hope they will be entertained. I wanted to write something whimsical, something fun (even if the fun is often dark). At the same time, even talking mice can be thought-provoking. If, upon finishing the book, my readers feel they have gained a surprising new perspective on traditional stories, I will be very happy.
So much excellent advice is already out there. Live a full life. Read, read as much as you can, across all genres. Approach your writing not as sporadic visits from some flighty muse but as a daily grind. Budget your time. One thing I would stress especially: for a woman writer with a family, it is absolutely essential to carve out not only a “room of one’s own” in your home but also a “room of one’s own” in your mind—a place where you can go and forget, for a stretch, about children’s homework, dinner, and laundry, and devote yourself fully to the world you are creating. Without this intense concentration, without this full immersion, book-length projects cannot be sustained. Teach people who share your life to respect your work from day one.