Writing Roots

S31E5 – Journalistic Storytelling

From journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct an interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there. – Isabel Allende

S30E9 – Coming of Age Stories

I don’t give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am – I really do – but people never notice it. People never notice anything. – JD Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

S30E8 – The Odd Couple

What’s wrong with policemen on television these days? They’re always complete opposites. One’s of them fat and poor, the other one’s thin and posh. One of them’s a woman, the other one’s a Martian. One of them has four heads, one of them’s allergic to heads. – Inspector Fowler, The Thin Blue Line

S30BE – The Unreliable Narrator

Don’t worry: These ramblings will not be insufferably gloomy…. When at first I proved unable to keep the tone light, Ozzie suggested that I be an unreliable narrator. “It worked for Agatha Christie in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” he said. In that first-person mystery novel, the nice-guy narrator turns out to be the murderer of Roger Ackroyd, a fact he conceals from the reader until the end. Understand, I am not a murderer. I have done nothing evil that I am concealing from you. My unreliability as a narrator has to do largely with the tense of certain verbs…. – Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas