Favorite Writer Presentation How-to

and sample

General Requirements:These are individual powerpoint presentations of 10-15 minutes

The slides should include:1. Author’s name2. Author’s photo3. Brief autobiographical info (shouldn’t be

the focus of your presentation!)

4. Quotes – w/ page numbers – from books. These should be quotes you like, quotes that speak to you, quotes that are evidence of why you like this author.

5. A few comments about writing which the author has made

6. A source slide, which shows where you got your information

Easy! Check the sample which follows, which was made by student Kat Heron in 2012.

Donna TarttAuthor of the novels A Secret History and The

Little Friend

Donna Tartt

Novelist.

Author of The Secret History and The Little Friend.

Attended Bennington College, where she began writing The Secret History.

Worked on The Secret History for ten years. Once published, it became a bestseller.

Her second novel, The Little Friend won the WH Smith Literary Award.

The Secret History “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you know. It was one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history -- state troopers, the FBI, even an army helicopter; the college closed, the dye factory in Hampden shut down, people coming from New Hampshire, upstate New York, as far away as Boston. It is difficult to believe that Henry’s modest plan could have worked so well despite the unforeseen events. We hadn’t intended to hide the body where it couldn’t be found. In fact, we hadn’t hidden it at all but had simply left it where it fell in hopes that some luckless passer-by would stumble over it before anyone noticed he was missing. This was a tale that told itself simply and well: the loose rocks, the body at the bottom of the ravine with a clean break in the neck, and the muddy skidmarks of dug-in heels pointing the way down; a hiking accident, no more, no less, and it might have been left at that, at quiet tears and a small funeral, had it not been for the snow that fell that night ... ” (Tartt 3)

The Secret History

“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark

crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside of literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. A moi. L’histoire d’une de mes folies. My name is Richard Papen. I am twenty-eight years old and I had never seen New England or Hampden College until I was nineteen. I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently discovered, by nature. The last is something I admit only now, after the fact. Not that it matters.” (Tartt 7)

The Secret History

“ ‘Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of our own being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?” (Tartt 40)

Donna Tartt’s Thoughts about Writing

“The reason that early success can be so disorienting to writers is that for one [thing] it leads them into overproduction. There is suddenly an expectation that they [novels] should just be coming down the conveyor belt at a regular rate. It's a question of if you want to play by those rules or you don't.”

“It is just pebble by pebble by pebble by pebble. I write one sentence until I am happy with it until I go on to the next one and write that one until I am happy with it. And I look at my paragraph and if I am not happy with that I’ll write the paragraph until I’m happy with it and then I go on this way.”

“In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.”

“Character, to me, is the life’s blood of fiction.”

www.identitytheory.com/people/birnbaum77.html

www.languageisavirus.com/donna_tartt

www.notablebiographies.com

vwww.goodquotes.com

Sources