Jesse Stuart's 'Split Cheery Tree'

Many authors relate their own lives into the stories that they write as a way to express their feelings. Edwidge Danticat's life in Haiti affected much of her writing and she likes to relate her life into her books. A few ways she did relate her life into the book ‘Untwine’ is by writing about the death that she experienced, using her Haitian descent in the character's life, by making the character love art just as much as she does, and having the characters parents immigrate from Haiti just like her and so many of her family members did.

I gained a new perceptive during class, when reading “George Saunders Explains How to Tell a Good Story”. The reading of this article help me understood how to use more details to makes my story’s more meaningful. The reading of this article help me build up my paper on “No such Things” to use details to descipbe a story. Through the reading of the article, it help me to use experience through my life to build on my topic “…memory is an unreliable traveling companion through the years”. The reading of the article help me to create a meaningful story to blend it in with experience in my life and also to blending in with the topic of my paper.

Throughout all of time, literature has played an important role in people’s lives. Books are more than just stories to laugh at, cry with, or fall asleep to, but books can teach. Books can teach a person a simple task such as baking cookies or an extremely complex one such as solving for the derivative of a trigonometric path and its parabolic motion. Whatever the subject, whomever the reader, books can teach people many lessons. One of the most important lessons that a book can teach a reader is a lesson about himself, about the difficulties of life, and about living a good life. As time has passed, so has literature itself. Older books focused on historical events, fictional poetry, and important figures; however, books now have evolved to

The author skillfully uses literary techniques to convey his purpose of giving life to a man on an extraordinary path that led to his eventual demise and truthfully telling the somber story of Christopher McCandless. Krakauer enhances the story by using irony to establish Chris’s unique personality. The author also uses Characterization the give details about Chris’s lifestyle and his choices that affect his journey. Another literary element Krakauer uses is theme. The many themes in the story attract a diverse audience. Krakauer’s telling is world famous for being the truest, and most heart-felt account of Christopher McCandless’s life. The use of literary techniques including irony, characterization and theme help convey the authors

To truly understand a great novel and its author, the reader must dig deep inside the life

Life writing is a genre that’s more equivocal than other genres. It has its own codes and conventions which help convey its own key ideas and messages. The arrangement of the codes and conventions help the audience recognize the connection between other life writing texts. One of the these is how perspective is used to convey the authors aspects of the real incident. This convention links to the one of the codes, language, where the composer uses languages to create personal accounts of a person’s life. All authors use language to express their experience. This verbalization is what links all life writing texts together.

In his short story, “Not-Knowing”, Donald Barthelme brings the audience into the typical planning and step-by-step thought process he has when beginning to write a story. He highlights different writing styles and how they can convey the point one would be trying to make. Barthelme also allows us to see his personal method for writing stories, addressing the necessity that is not knowing as well as how not having a traditional plot structure ahead of writing is what calls for good, artistic pieces of literature to be produced. He displays that his characters do not typically come with preplanned life stories beforehand, but rather life stories that “come into being at the instant it’s inscribed.” Another useful piece of advice is making sure that the lifestyles one does construct for their characters lean towards being more realistic and

The occasion of the story is a crucial advice about critical reading: one has to “read between the lines” to fully understand an idea. According to the speaker, he not only wants the readers to “read between the lines” but also to write between the lines to effectively enhance one’s critical reading skills. The speaker encourages readers to take notes inside a book to fully retain one’s knowledge about the book and make it a

Many authors use storytelling as a vehicle to convey the immortality of past selves and those who have passed to not only in their piece of literature but in their life as an author. In Tim O’Brien’s work of fiction The Things They Carried, through his final chapter “The Lives of the Dead,” O 'Brien conveys that writing is a matter of survival since, the powers of storytelling can ensure the immortality of all those who were significant in his life. Through their immortality, O’Brien has the ability to save himself with a simple story. Through snippets of main plot event of other chapters, O’Brien speaks to the fact the dead have not actually left; they are gone physically, but not spiritually or emotionally. They live on in memories as Linda lives on in the memories of O’Brien and as many of his war buddies live on through his stories. He can revive them and bring them back to the world through his writings and through these emotions or events he experienced with them and with their deaths can make them immortal. Through the reminiscent stories of Linda and O’Brien’s war companions and himself, O’Brien conveys that storytelling allows people to reanimate others who have died and past selves to create an immortality of humans.

A story is only as good as the way it is told. The way a writer uses his or her words to say something is just as important as what they don’t say. Charles Baxter, author of plethora of books and university teacher, writes a craft book that goes deeper than the surface of writing and deeper than the words written down. In Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext, he discusses how authors can use the words they do write just as much to express what they don’t write.

Chapter six, … Or the Bible, of How to Read Literature Like A Professor (HTRLLAP) asserts that connect all of the dots is vital, and how a story about the loss of innocence always hit so hard because they are final. The two biggest points of this chapter, though, are how not all uses of religion are straight-forward, how some are there just to illustrate a disparity and that the names of the characters in a novel are almost always important to a writer's point and can help carry their message.

Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor begins with an introduction that provides a framework for the next five chapters. The author explains that any story can fit into a general, archetypical theme, and he spends the first five chapters of his book speaking on these critically prevalent themes.

Indeed, the best works of literature are those which are of relevance to our lives today. Through their relevance, these novels continue to persist and endure on. Through their relevance, we can better comprehend the messages, the themes, and the ideas that are imbued in them. Rather than literature being contradictory and in conflict with the truth and unpleasant reality of daily life, it becomes a weapon through which we can be educated about the existential crises facing our world today. In fact, the statement above could not be more far and distant from the reality of literature today. It is fatally flawed. Literature, whilst at the surface, seems whimsical and amusing is, at its very core, a medium through which we are enlightened

“It is through literature that we learn about life. Through literature we profit from the experiences of others, comparing them with our own.” - Bob Cameron