fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
I blame Gordon Lightfoot. Many songs incorporate aspects of storytelling but only a few are truly narrative, such that stripping away their music would leave a clear, functional story. And, for whatever reason, those stories tend to focus on the sea. The first, clearest example of this trend is Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund [...]
Final Fantasy VII's story is bonkers: A genetically engineered super-soldier overthrows the corporation that acts as a de facto world government and then, believing that he has a divine right to rule, summons a meteor to strike the planet so that he can merge with the energy of all living things, becoming a god. But [...]
Worldbuilding is exhausting. It requires a massive amount of mental energy to imagine and then codify an entirely new world with all its nooks and crannies, its politics and customs. To expedite this process, many works of fantasy rely on familiar tropes as a shortcut, allowing vast institutions to be explained away by a few [...]
Having loosed a monster that he does not understand and which threatens to destroy him, Ged spends much of A Wizard of Earthsea running. The titular wizard's constant flight eventually leaves him wholly exhausted and on the brink of annihilation, at which point he returns to the mage who was his first master, Ogion. Under [...]
This is a test.
In his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges—that miraculous, mind-fucking Argentinian—proposes an unusual premise. The titular Menard is shown to be obsessed with unusual literary feats and, as such, he decides to take it upon himself to rewrite Cervantes' classic, Don Quixote. He's not planning to translate the book or [...]
A decade ago I sat in a collegiate music composition class and listened to a professor explain how, in order to write a truly great song, it was necessary to hone an idea over and over, fully exploring it and discovering the best way to implement it. Young people, he posited, struggled with this because [...]
This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. - Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” In one of his most famous stories, Argentine metaphysical author Jorge Luis Borges positions his narrator in the fictitious and eponymous Library of Babel, wherein [...]
It's over. Finished. Done. National Novel Writing Month has finally ended. [sigh of relief] It's a weird experience, NaNoWriMo, not least of all because it forces you to think about writing as work, an obligation. Maybe that's not the intent of the event, and it's certainly possible that other participants don't feel this way, but [...]
Here's the thing about NaNo. Well, not the thing, since I already talked about that, but another thing. Oh, I did that already, too? How about another another thing? Alright, then. Another another thing it is. See, as that last paragraph indicates, NaNo makes you kind of crazy. Which I think is counterintuitive. Most people would, [...]
Songs & Stories 