Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Announcing the Hercule Poirot Centenary Blogathon

This year Hercule Poirot turns 100, and my friend Giulietta over at the Liberi di Scrivere blog is launching a blogathon to celebrate this event. I will be lending a hand both on my Italian blog strategie evolutive and here on Karavansara.
Sp yes, if you feel like joining in, drop a line in the comments or go over at Giulietta’s place and sign up in her comments.

Here’s the official call…

Hercule Poirot turns 100 this year. He first appeared in The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, when London-based publisher John Lane, co-founder with Charles Elkin Mathews of Bodley Head publishing house, decided to publish it in the United States.

For Agatha Christie, it was the beginning of one of the most incredible literary careers imaginable, and even today her books appear in the top positions on sales charts all over the world.

Much of her success is due to Poirot, a former Belgian police officer who fled to England due to the First World War and became the world’s most famous private investigator.

To celebrate Poirot, and his author, Liberi di Scrivere announces the launch of THE HERCULE POIROT CENTENARY BLOGATHON

The rules:

  • Each blogger can write an article in which he talks about a novel or a story in which Poirot is the protagonist or a theme of their choice: like Poirot in the cinema, Poirot in comics, Poirot in the kitchen etc …
  • Each blogger is invited to talk about a different book / topic.
  • A link to this launch post will be included in the post to be published.
  • The Blogathon will take place on Monday 12th October 2020. Each blogger will post their article on that date.
  • You are all invited to participate, leave a comment with the name of your blog, the url and the chosen topic, you will be added to our list. The more we are, the more fun it will be. If you want clarifications or more information you can contact me at my email address: liberidiscrivere@gmail.com.


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The writer’s responsibilities

I am reading Philip Pullman’s Daemon Voices, a collection of essays, articles and talks about the ins and outs of storytelling. I love reading books about writing by writers, and so far I am finding much to agree with Pullman’s positions.

The book opens with a the transcript of a speech Pullman gave about the idea of responsibility for writers, and I found myself cheering and taking notes as I read. Yes, it’s that good.

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One of the lucky ones

In three weeks flat I will be 53 years old. And for the first time in… well, in almost 53 years, in the last few weeks I really, really felt old. Systems needing a good check, structural tear and wear, and a general sensation of the end of the line approaching.
I guess it happens, from time to time.

And this morning I found, via the IQ Facebook page, a ling to an interesting web gadget called Life Stats: you dial in your date of birth, and they give you a short animated presentation about how much the world has changed since you first came here.

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Cruel and Unusual

Quite a few years back, I used to contribute reviews and articles to a small literary magazine based in Turin. It was a lot of fun, I met some great people, and started to develop the habit of writing regularly on themes and with schedules set by others.

The magazine hosted a number of independent writers, and it even had some international contributors. One of these was a Japanese gentleman who was writing a book about the Tokyo underworld of fetish and BDSM clubs. He would send chapters to the magazine, that published them as a series. He was quite a good writer, and his pieces were always a great read, very literary and really in no way X-rated.

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Never write angry

One thing I learned a while back is that writing to vent frustration or anger is – for me, of course – a bad idea. In the past I did write a few times to “put somebody in their place”, or to prove with my work that what others claimed was wrong.
The stories sucked.

This is because, I think, no matter what the main engine of our writing is – I have friends that write to keep sane, or to leave behind a reality they find oppressive and explore alternatives, and people that writes just because it’s fun, or it’s the only thing they know … no matter what the nature of the impulse that pushes us forward, we cannot have anything else in our mind but the story.
If we write for ten minutes, in those ten minutes we need to be into the story, without distractions, without second purposes or agendas but to write the best damn story we can.

Writing is a process, a craft, a set of behaviors.
But we need to sort out our priorities.
Writing out of anger can happen, but it does not work if the anger is not focused on the story. If we’re focusing on someone, if we are keeping it small-scale and personal, it all goes pear-shaped.

Which probably means writing should be a form of transmutation – we come to it with our load of anger, anguish, sadness, fear or whatever, and by passing through the story, through the writing process, we make it less personal, less limited. We leave those emotions behind, strip them of their power on our life. We look at these emotions with clarity.

Or something.
Bottom line: never write angry, or if you can’t avoid it, direct your anger at some universal injustice.