Oz, but she prefers the tried and true to the unfamiliar and strange. In order to go home, she discovers, she’ll have to visit the wizard who lives in the Emerald City. A

And how does she reach him? By following the yellow brick road.

In a space of only a few lines, Dorothy has stated her goal—to go back to Kansas—and been given a set of subgoals as well. As she tries to meet an ever-shifting set of subgoals, her main goal keeps viewers glued to the TV set.

This overriding concern—will she or won’t she make it home?—is known as the dramatic question. The dramatic question in every murder mystery is Who committed the crime? The dramatic question in nearly every thriller is Who will win the inevitable showdownthe moon that shone through the window, and ruined our eyes."

And this is the best part:

"We were reading because we had two lives, an inner life and an outer life, and they were equally important to us and equally vivid. A novelist is someone whose inner experience is as compelling as the details of his or her life, someone who may owe more to another author, never met, than to a close relative seen every day. A novelist has two lives--a reading and writing life, and a lived life. He or she cannot be understood at all apart from this."

Sunday, October 23, 2005

Photo: signing books for students at the wonderful Grace Christian School in Ohio. With the new haircut.

I've recently discovered what every woman dreams of: a hair-cutting