"Words are like arrows, once loosened you cannot call them back."

- Doran Martell. A Feast for Crows: George R. R. Martin

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Cheever’s narratives rarely end ‘happily ever after’. Why might a writer choose to make their characters suffer?

' The Swimmer ', Neddy returns home to find his family gone and house empty; ' Torch song ', Jack is left on the brink of death; ' Reunion ', an estranged father and son are left no closer towards reconciliation: Cheever does not write uplifting stories; he writes stories which are truthful. Life isn't easy; we go through hardships and don't always come out on top, this is a theme which prevails throughout Cheever's stories. He himself said: “I write to make sense of my life." With the numerous times that Cheever alludes to alcohol and relationships, we don't have to dig too deeply to begin to suspect of the author's inner turmoil with alcoholism and questions of sexuality. His work is a means of making sense of and wrestling with this inner strife. But this is not a phenomena present solely in the work of John Cheever, authors notoriously have "a sliver of ice in their hearts", as said by Graham Greene. Authors do...
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Why are Cheever’s stories ‘uniquely American’? What would make a story uniquely British?

Quite recently a friend of mine noted that Ori (one of the dwarves from Peter Jackson's The Hobbit)  is the "best representation of true British folk." It's a statement, I think, has a great deal of sense to it. But what is it that makes him so quintessentially British? He isn't one of the warrior dwarves (although in Jackson's interpretation we see that he  can  fight). He is awkward, bumbling, soft-spoken, and hardly memorable. But ultimately Ori proves himself courageous and determined. He is, quite literally, a little man who stands up against a dragon and wins. Moreover, I find it interesting to note that Ori is a writer, accompanying the other dwarves to the Lonely Mountain as their scribe. So what can this mean for British writers? If American writers are coarse and blunt and include allusions to the American dream and capitalism, it would seem apt that British writers are more softly spoken, melancholic and sarcastic in their work. Perhaps this...
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‘No writer emerges from childhood into a pristine environment, free from other people’s biases about writers.’

Writer. It seems to be something of a dirty word. Were I to go into a room full of Creative Writing students and ask them how many were writers, I wonder how few tentative hands I would see raised. Instead we hedge ourselves, saying we want to be authors, journalists or screenwriters: practical jobs that we can assign a label and a pay-cheque to. We all love writing, but we're ashamed of being writers. In my opinion, as soon as children enter primary school their creativity is culled. These small children are already deciding what they want to be in life: firefighters, police officers, teachers, vets or nurses; all practical and sensible occupations. To say they wanted to grow up to be a writer would be like them saying they wanted to grow into a penguin. A ridiculous notion! Anyone can write; everyone has a book in them : these are the things we're told from the beginning, and as with Rose in Who Do You Think You Are? when we try to be a writer, we're told that...
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