Ben Hoare - Storytelling & Serial Autobiography

Uncategorized Archive

Making

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

I like the metaphor of making. Making sense Making love Make believe Makeup Making friends Making enemies Making mincemeat. These are dead metaphors now, but if we view them literally they all suggest the idea of invention or transformation. When we make sense, we create something new out of what is there - a text is nothing until we ...

Big Brother isn’t boring (or maybe it is)

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

The only thing I'm finding boring about Big Brother as it begins its ninth full series is the debate about whether or not it's boring. As I read Cilla Black's thoughts in the Metro this week and recognise echoes from elsewhere, I think of that other dull debate that surfaces every ...

The present tense in fiction and autobiography

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

Although delivering a narrative in the present tense is by no means a modern technique, its popularity seems to be growing among contemporary novelists. Many modern novelists shift between the past and present tense to distinguish between the multiple narratives they are presenting. In Justin Cartwright’s The Promise of Happiness, the ...

Performing

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

There is a tendency, in live poetry, for the performers to talk in between poems, explaining the background behind the piece they are about to read.  This seems reasonable enough.  After all, a performer needs to engage with his audience – it would seem strange if a poet just stood ...

What is an autobiographical memory?

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

Autobiographical memory has been defined in various ways in the field of psychology, but the basic concept is simple: it is a subjective, constructive account of the past based on personal memory. I became interested in autobiographical memory when I started asking myself how auto/biographers might solve the problem of chronology: ...