A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic by Peter Turchi (PDF)

Description

With his characteristic talent for finding the connections between writing and the stuff of our lives (most notably in his earlier hit Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer), Peter Turchi ventures into new, and even more surprising, territory. In A Muse and a Maze, Turchi draws out the similarities between writing and puzzle-making and its flip side, puzzle-solving. He teases out how mystery lies at the heart of all storytelling. And he uncovers the magic—the creation of credible illusion—that writers share with the likes of Houdini and master magicians.In Turchi’s associative narrative, we learn about the history of puzzles, their obsessive quality, and that Benjamin Franklin was a devotee of an ancient precursor of sudoku called Magic Squares. Applying this rich backdrop to the requirements of writing, Turchi reveals as much about the human psyche as he does about the literary imagination and the creative process.With the goal of giving writers new ways to think about their work and readers new ways to consider the books they encounter, A Muse and a Maze suggests ways in which every piece of writing is a kind of puzzle. The work argues that literary writing is defined, at least in part, by its embrace of mystery; offers tangrams as a model for the presentation of complex characters; compares a writer’s relationship to his or her narrator to magicians and wizards; offers the maze and the labyrinth as alternatives to the more common notion of the narrative line; and concludes with a discussion of how readers and writers, like puzzle solvers, not only tolerate but find pleasure in difficulty.While always balancing erudition with accessibility, Turchi examines the work of writers as various as A. A. Milne, Dashiell Hammett, Truman Capote, Anton Chekhov, Alison Bechdel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Antonya Nelson, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles D’Ambrosio, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Thomas Bernhard, and Mark Twain, elaborating and illuminating ways in which their works expand and deliver on the title’s double entendre, A Muse and a Maze.With 100 images that range from movie stills from Citizen Kane and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to examples of sudokus, crosswords, and other puzzles; from Norman Rockwell’s famous triple self-portrait to artwork by Charles Richie; and from historical arcana to today’s latest magic, A Muse and a Maze offers prose exposition, images, text quotations, and every available form of wisdom, leading the reader step-by-step through passages from stories and novels to demonstrate, with remarkable clarity, how writers evolve their eventual creations.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I wish I had Peter Turchi as a writing teacher.

⭐Quaint book detailing the different ways in which writing literature is like a puzzle. A lot of nice examples and cross references to different types of puzzle making. Anecdotal references, analogies, simile, artistry comparison are all in this book (as well as a few interactive puzzles). This book was useful in describing how a creative fiction writer should develop their stories like a puzzle for the reader to solve.

⭐Fascinating premise and rich in visuals.

⭐Excellent book for writers!

⭐Great author

⭐Not a fan. I was looking for something to jump-start my imagination for plot building. This is more like literary analysis for robots. I can’t finish it. I keep jumping forward to see if I’ll find anything I like about it. So far, almost nothing. His examples are dry and boring. The puzzles he uses (and I do like puzzles) are of the most technical and lifeless, and the book is literally infested with them. The puzzles and the points he tries to make are connected by the slenderest of threads and don’t illuminate much. This is a dull, rambling, and long-winded exposition of an interesting premise. No magic in this book.

⭐This is a brilliant book on writing craft, providing the reader with a new way to think about composing fiction. And it’s also simply a delight to read–smart, well organized, and full of muscular writing and funny anecdotes. And there are puzzles and illustrations in every chapter. I plan to use this in my next graduate fiction class.

⭐Beautifully illustrated, A Muse and A Maze delights as it demystifies the craft of writing, likening it to puzzles of all kinds. This has been my go-to writing book as I near the end of a first draft of my own book. Turchi’s brilliance enables both writers and readers to glimpse the wizard behind the curtain.

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