Books/Stories that have taught you about writing

One fish, two fish

Red fish, blue fish


Fuuuck man, still hit's me every time.

>>9081294
Trilobites is a tremendous short story. All of Pancake's short stories are written at that caliber, but Trilobites stuck with me the most.

But every time I read Virginia Woolf I want to drag a goddamn cheese grater across my face. It's like I'm a toddler struggling to stand upright and she's Usain Bolt zooming across the finish line backwards, laughing at everyone struggling to keep up.

>>9081294
He's pretty good. I think I liked A Room Forever in his collection the most.

I'd say W.G. Sebald is the writing that immediately put my head spinning. I started with The Rings of Saturn and loved how he blended a travel novel with random historical anecdotes while talking directly to the reader for the entire length.

>>9081351
A Room Forever was so emotionally draining but so well written.

>>9081341
Anything particular you learned from Woolf?

Pancake kind of taught me not to say everything too clearly. A lot of his descriptions both resonate with me and don't, like i can see and feel what he just described, but I'm doing it in all kinds of different ways, if that makes sense.

>>9081367
nothing I could apply personally, but psychological clarity and character interactions, the emphasis on setting as a sort of subject/environment examination, using objects to symbolize emotional significance. She writes way above my level so I don't try to shoehorn her techniques in.

>>9081367
>>9081378
to expand though, Woolf's narratives feel aphoristic without actually dropping one-liners. They way she sets up scenes, develops characters, and explores themes sets up an odd distant-precision. It doesn't feel cathartic or like self-insertion or self-indulgence from the author, but genuinely like viewing through a window and empathizing with the character. No moralizing, no preaching, no flourishes, just life as one experiences it. she strips you naked without making you feel vulnerable

>>9081294
WV fag here. His family still lives in the Milton and I visited them one time recently. It is interesting to hear his cousin talk about the melancholy he always had. If you want to check out a great bio of him, read A Room Forever (same title as his story).

>>9081423
what did he say about Breece's Melancholy?

>>9081457
It was a relatively brief visit (the guy is over 90), but he just mentioned that Pancake would go through these alternating periods of deep depression and attempts at reaching out to others. Apparently some parts of the family were shocked he killed himself, but others kept quiet and weren't really surprised.

>>9081457
>>9081525
Oddly enough, I am a lawyer and the way I got to meet the family is one of their distant relatives whose case I handled recently was put in jail and I asked if there was any relation. Small world.