H. P. Lovecraft’s Advice to Aspiring Writers, 1920 by Maria Popova “A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe’s will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.” “If there is a magic in story writing,” admonished Henry Miller, “and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.” And yet, famous advice on writing abounds. In January of 1920, iconic science fiction and fantasy author H. P. Much like Jennifer Egan did nearly a century later, Lovecraft stresses the vital osmosis between reading and writing: No aspiring author should content himself with a mere acquisition of technical rules. … All attempts at gaining literary polish must begin with judicious reading, and the learner must never cease to hold this phase uppermost. Lovecraft notes the equal importance of non-reading as intellectual choice:
Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling--Visualized Note: This article is included in our year-end storytelling advice round-up. A while back, now-former Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats tweeted a series of pearls of narrative wisdom she had gleaned from working at the studio. This list of 22 rules of storytelling was widely embraced as it was applicable to any writer or anyone who was in the business of communicating (which is pretty much everyone, including software developers). And much of its advice (e.g. "You gotta keep in mind what's interesting to you as an audience, not what's fun to do as a writer. They can be very different") is still as applicable as ever. Last week, Dino Ignacio, a UX Director at a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, created a series of image macros of the 22 rules, posting them to Imgur. Have a look through more of them in the slides above.
The Most Moving and Timelessly Beautiful LGBTQ Love Letters in History What is love? This question haunts the human psyche perhaps more persistently than any other. It has occupied our collective imagination for millennia, it has baffled scientists, taunted philosophers, and tantalized artists. So mystified by love were the Ancient Greeks that they itemized six types of it. But nothing defines it with more exquisite expressiveness than the love letter. At its best, it makes the personal universal, then personal again — a writer from another era or another culture captures the all-consuming complexity of love with more richness and color and dimension than we ourselves could, making us feel at once less alone and more whole in our understanding of love and of ourselves. As we turn the leaf on a new chapter of modern history that embraces a more inclusive definition of love — both culturally and, at last, politically — here is a celebration of the human heart’s highest capacity through history’s most beautiful and timelessly bewitching LGBTQ love letters.
Kafka on Books and What Reading Does for the Human Soul By Maria Popova “Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy,” E.B. White wrote while contemplating the future of reading in 1951. Indeed, the question of why books matter and what reading does for the human spirit has occupied minds great and little, from Carl Sagan’s beautiful meditation in Cosmos to the 9-year-old girl whose question about why we have books I once answered. In a November 1903 letter, found in the altogether enchanting compendium Letters to Friends, Family and Editors (public library), 20-year-old Kafka writes to his childhood friend, the art historian Oskar Pollak: Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle. A few months later, in January of 1904, he expounds on this sentiment in another letter to Pollak: I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.
"I think if you're trying to present the point of view... Correspondence Course: John Moe Is Deconstructing Pop Culture, One Letter At A Time Public radio listeners may know John Moe as the eloquent and affable host of the nationally syndicated American Public Media series Wits, which has presented a variety of guests such as Neil Gaiman, Roseanne Cash, Yo La Tengo, John Hodgman, Paul F Tompkins, Maria Bamford, and many more, in an eclectic broadcast which combines improv, sketch comedy, conversation, and music, recorded before a live audience at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota. True to the title of the show, Moe brings both wit and warmth to the program, the latter of which is a particularly useful tool to fight legendarily brutal, and potentially fatal, St. "God tries to ice murder all the people here every year," Moe once observed, "and we always feel triumphant when/if we survive." While Moe's public radio career has put him on the national map, readers of McSweeney's may know him for his Pop Song Correspondences, which were fictional reply letters to popular songs. Speaking on the phone from St. "St.
How to Get Ahead At Your Creative Job--From A Guy Who Went From "Daily Show" Intern to Head Writer The key to succeeding in some businesses is simple: be quantitatively better at your job than anybody else. What it takes to thrive in a creative field is more nebulous, though. In a career where success is a qualitative calculation, it can be difficult to measure performance. Whatever makes up such metrics, though, the powers that be at The Daily Show have always singled out Elliot Kalan as decidedly crushing it. When he isn't busy being the new head writer at The Daily Show, Kalan also co-hosts a popular podcast about movies. Kalan started as an intern at The Daily Show in 2003. The Standard Advice Applies In Creative Fields Too The summer before I worked at the show as an intern, I worked at Barnes and Noble, and I learned a lot there about the best ways to get ahead in a work situation. Know When To Take Risks I took any opportunity I could to show I could do creative thinking without butting in and doing inappropriate things. Work Hard At Being Creative Put A Lot Of Junk In Your Head
"The Fault In Our Stars" Author John Green On Building A Passionate Audience How did a young-adult novel about teens with cancer turn into a best-selling phenomenon that makes even skeptical grown-ups weep all over their Kindles? Partly because John Green's The Fault in Our Stars is irresistible, mixing wit and emotion without a hint of mawkishness. But credit also goes to Green's devoted online fans, known as Nerdfighters. Green and his brother, Hank, have grown the group through an ongoing series of hugely popular YouTube videos, which have attracted a total of 1.5 billion views (yes, billion). With a movie version of TFIOS opening June 6 (and Green and his wife's new online contemporary-art show, The Art Assignment, now on PBS.com), that fan base could soon get even bigger. Green explains his approach to creating community. Start small When Green and his brother began making videos in 2007, their ambitions were modest. Phoniness is deadly If your goal is real connection, never pretend to be something you aren't. Be an open book Don't settle for the ordinary
Bob Dylan on Sacrifice, the Unconscious Mind, and How to Cultivate the Perfect Environment for Creative Work by Maria Popova “People have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them.” Van Morrison once characterized Bob Dylan (b. Zollo captures Dylan’s singular creative footprint: Pete Seeger said, “All songwriters are links in a chain,” yet there are few artists in this evolutionary arc whose influence is as profound as that of Bob Dylan. One essential aspect of Dylan’s creative process that comes up again and again in the interview is the notion of the unconscious and the optimal environment for its free reign. It’s nice to be able to put yourself in an environment where you can completely accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from your inner workings of your mind. Like many creators, Dylan values that unconscious aspect of creativity far more than rational deliberation, speaking to the idea that the muse cannot be willed, only welcomed — a testament to the role of unconscious processing in the psychological stages of creative work. [Pause] Sometimes. Donating = Loving
¡¡Quiero publicar una novela!! ¿Qué hago? | El cazador de Libros ¡Hola a todos! Hoy voy a dedicar la entrada del blog a responder de manera genérica a todos los que me preguntáis por e-mail, Facebook, Tuenti, comments de blog, etc etc... cómo publicar una novela. Pues bien, como ya he dicho, lo primero es TERMINARLA. Sé que parece algo obvio, pero os sorprendería la de veces que me encuentro con chavales y chavalas que quieren saber dónde enviar su novela o con quién deben contactar dentro de una editorial cuando no tienen ni tres capítulos de su libro. Después os recomiendo que se la paséis a vuestros amigos cercanos o familiares o profesores o lo que queráis para que os den un punto de vista externo. Una vez que estéis contentos con el resultado, registradlo en la Propiedad Intelectual. Cuando lo tengáis hecho, entrad en Internet y poneos en contacto con ellas. Hecho esto, debéis tener en cuenta unas cuantas cosas que enumero a continuación: Ser autor novel y llegar a una editorial con una saga, es un problema. Chicos, chicas… Un saludo, Javier.
How to Write For Any Medium (From a Guy Who's Written For "The New Yorker," "Saturday Night Live," and Pixar) Aside from the fact that his name is right there at the top of the page, it’s always fairly obvious when a "Shouts and Murmurs" piece in The New Yorker is the product of Simon Rich. Telltale signs include the elegant skewering of adult human behavior, as glimpsed through the eyes of children, animals, spectral beings, or inanimate objects—and the fact that the reader is hunched over laughing. These short essays comprise just one of the many textual weapons at the writer’s disposal, however, and only one of the fields on which he regularly deploys them. Rich’s recently-completed second novel, What in God’s Name? occupies shelf space right next to his previous effort, Elliot Allagash (for which Jason Reitman bought the movie rights), and two short story collections. Rarely is such range achieved in any writing career, let alone by the ripe old age of 28, but that’s what happens when prodigious talent meets ceaseless work ethic, and is fortified by some admitted neuroses.
David Foster Wallace on Writing, Self-Improvement, and How We Become Who We Are by Maria Popova “Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.” In late 1999, David Foster Wallace — poignant contemplator of death and redemption, tragic prophet of the meaning of life, champion of intelligent entertainment, admonisher against blind ambition, advocate of true leadership — called the office of the prolific writer-about-writing Bryan A. Over the course of the exchange, the two struck up a friendship and began an ongoing correspondence, culminating in Garner’s extensive interview with Wallace, conducted on February 3, 2006, in Los Angeles — the kind of conversation that reveals as much about its subject matter, in this case writing and language, as it does about the inner workings of its subject’s psyche. Wallace begins at the beginning, responding to Garner’s request to define good writing: This act of paying attention, Wallace argues, is a matter of slowing oneself down. The writing writing that I do is longhand. . . .