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The difference between story and plot
Story is the chronological order readers discover when they ask “what happened next”? Plot is the order readers experience when they pay attention to what happens next as they read. Plotting is what storytellers do when making decisions about how to unravel their story. Storytellers don’t tell the entire story. They pull out the […]
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Picturebook Study: The Glance Curve
The glance curve describes a Western reader’s tendency to read a picture from left to right. This affects how illustrators compose scenes. In relation to the perception of visual art, the German psychologist Mercedes Gaffron (1908-93) argued in 1950 that Western viewers unconsciously followed a basic perceptual path in looking at two-dimensional perspectival representations—a left-to-right […]
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Possum Magic by Mem Fox and Julie Vivas
Possum Magic is a classic Australian picture book by Mem Fox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BboBeS-vhjg WHAT HAPPENS IN THE STORY OF POSSUM MAGIC Grandma Poss uses bush magic to make a child possum (Hush) invisible so that Hush won’t be eaten by snakes. (I’m going to put aside the fact that snakes seem to ‘see’ via vibrations, so […]
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What is irony in literature?
“Given a long enough time, of course, a wide enough frame, there is nothing said or done, ever, that isn’t ironic in the end.” Madame Morrible, Wicked, Gregory Maguire These notes draw heavily from a Narrative Breakdown podcast called The Power Of Irony. See also: All Good Stories Are Ironic from Cockeyed Caravan blog. Irony [is] […]
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What does glamour mean?
The following are notes from a podcast from Zocalo Public Square: Why Do We Need Glamour? The speaker is Virginia Postrel, who has also delivered a TED Talk. Her book is called The Power Of Glamour. What is glamour? The word ‘glamour’ gets sprinkled around on magazine covers: shiny furniture, jewel tones, satin dresses. This conveys […]
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Ideology In Children’s Literature
Every novel, every painting, every work of art with meaning contains an ideology. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think one can avoid writing of such […]
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What Is Transmedia?
Transmedia Storytelling references the process of using various parts and elements of a topic that are shared periodically via multiple means of delivery (transmedia) for the explicit purpose of drawing in, intriguing and entertaining those who are targeted to receive the transmedia. Cat Flippen And gives an example using The Matrix: Parts of the entire […]
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Stereotypes, Tropes, Caricature and Archetypes
WHAT IS A STEREOTYPE? “Stereotype” is originally a printing term referring to the plate used to print identical copies of something, so “break[s] the mold” is an apt phrase for describing something that’s distinctly different from the stereotype. (“Mold” refers to the mold used to create identical objects, not the mold that grows on old […]
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What’s a Hipster?
The term hipster in its present usage first appeared in the 1990s and became particularly prominent in the late 2000s and early 2010s. But there was an earlier hipster movement in the 1940s. Hipsters (or hepcats) in the late 1940s, referred to lovers of jazz, especially bebop. The first hipsters were Black. Modern hipsters are thought to […]
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Lampshading in storytelling. What is that?
“Lampshading” is one of my favourite and least favourite writer tricks: It’s where you acknowledge a shortcoming in your plot through some dialogue, usually jokey, as a way of winking at the audience and moving on.
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What Is A Motif, Visual Motif and Leitmotif?
What is a motif, how is it different from symbolism, and what are the different kinds?
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Symbolic Annihilation and Symbolic Glorification
Symbolic annihilation is used to highlight the erasure of peoples in popular communication, including in children’s books, of course.
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Glossary of Picturebook Terminology For Review and Analysis
Is it picture book or picturebook? When commentators put the two words together, they do so mindfully: The terminology we apply to books, texts and reading do not seem to attach to the picturebook so readily. For example, if we speak of ‘the text’ of a picturebook, do we mean the words or the words-and-pictures […]
