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1 week ago | 
ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler
I’m thrilled to share that Holly Payne, host of The Page One Podcast, has invited me to join her monthly for a granular look into the most powerful part of any novel—its opening lines.
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1 week ago | 
ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler
The narrator, Kyungha, and her friend, Inseon, are out walking in the snow, and Inseon is telling the narrator a story about the time when she was 17 and almost died. It’s a long sentence, made lengthy because of the two dependent clauses, each beginning with the subordinate conjunction ‘as.’ Each clause is further elongated by a simile.
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2 weeks ago | 
ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler
So much amazing prose was written today! I introduced the lyrical plot, which is a rhythmic repetition of a key image or cluster of imagery, a key event or group of events, or a central idea…
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2 weeks ago | 
ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler
Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. The narrator and her friend are 15 years old, working at a theme park called Storyland. The narrator is a ticket taker and Sils is Cinderella, and they deal daily with the mobs of tourists.
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3 weeks ago | 
ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler
It’s been far too long since we gathered and wrote together! I’ve been teaching alternative plot structures this semester and want to introduce you…
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3 weeks ago | 
ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler
Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Harold Brodkey should be known by every writer. He spooled out fresh psychologically astute stories with amazing prose, a writer who was daring, and though he sometimes missed, I’d take that a million times over. As great writers do, he “unselfs” himself, to use the philosopher Iris Murdoch’s term, slipping into the skin of a young boy whose life revolves around a bigger-than-life father. The first sentence is a simple sentence.
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1 month ago | 
ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler
Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. It’s winter, early morning, and in this essay, Ted Kooser is walking the rolling hills of southeastern Nebraska, known as the Bohemian Alps. Nothing is too small for Kooser’s attention, and what he attends to he does with care and an ear filled with sound and rhythm.
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1 month ago | 
ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler
Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. We. The first-person plural pronoun. It’s where we begin, embedded in family, the border of self blurred with and absorbed by others, which ushers in immense good and possibly immense harm. The three young brothers watch all day for their father who is supposed to return home with a new family car. The boys see him down the block and start running to the new car, a truck, cobalt blue, with a bench seat, everything sparkling and sleek.
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1 month ago | 
ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler
Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. You run to Joy Williams when you want to laugh or experience a new brand of the world. Those absurd, quirky, irrational, bewildering moments that most writers forget or excise—Williams wants them. She collects them and makes something that has never been seen before. “Her tales offer a dark, provisional illumination, and they make the kind of sense that disperses upon waking,” wrote Katy Waldman of The New Yorker.
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1 month ago | 
ninaschuyler.substack.com | Denis Johnson |Nina Schuyler
Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. It’s 1917, and Robert Grainier, his wife and infant daughter live far from the railroad village of Meadow Creek, Idaho. Grainer is a laborer who does a lot of different jobs, including building bridges for the train to cross over bodies of water. The engine referred to in the sentence helps drag logs out of the forest. It’s an epic story told in miniature, a slim 116 pages, filled with beautiful sentences like this one.