{"id":2551,"date":"2018-11-07T17:20:16","date_gmt":"2018-11-07T17:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chrisrivard.com\/?p=2551"},"modified":"2018-11-07T17:20:16","modified_gmt":"2018-11-07T17:20:16","slug":"chekhov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/chekhov\/","title":{"rendered":"Chekhov"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>[when he speaks] flies die of boredom.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The thing about Chekhov is that the insight or turn of phrase always catches one off guard. I was reading <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/A_Dreary_Story\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">A Boring Story<\/a> and it paces along nicely &#8211; not so much in classic prose style&#8230; but excellent pacing. The details of place names or character references aren&#8217;t so important to the story, but it&#8217;s the succinct capturing of human nature. It&#8217;s timeless. It&#8217;s easy to map the traits of his characters to people you&#8217;ve met.<\/p>\n<p>The Hunstman is another good one. Checkhov frames out the characters and sketches just enough of their relationship to let the reader complete the story. Maybe that&#8217;s a quality of good fiction &#8211; it&#8217;s not so much of a complete, high fidelity account of every detail, but just enough to let the reader close the loop. It&#8217;s the <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/track\/3Dbgo1HE3DErIBNDIO4Hyd?si=Oj_o_1ErQoGyYHo6IQGhqA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">blank space<\/a>, what isn&#8217;t written that captures the reader&#8217;s imagination.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been reading Checkhov&#8217;s short stories in between pop science business books and nonfiction. It&#8217;s been nice to return to a well written short story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[when he speaks] flies die of boredom. The thing about Chekhov is that the insight or turn of phrase always catches one off guard. I was reading A Boring Story and it paces along nicely &#8211; not so much in classic prose style&#8230; but excellent pacing. The details of place names or character references aren&#8217;t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sartor-resartus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}