Setting: Using Scene To Enrich Your Writing
In both fiction and nonfiction, the setting is the general background against which your story takes place—the physical location and time period, both of which influence your characters and plot. So how can a creative writer use setting and scenery to further offset, augment, or reflect the action of the plot? Although we’re going to be exploring this issue in terms of fiction, these techniques work for nonfiction as well. These craft techniques work in all genres: poetry, stories, personal essays, memoir, and books. Suppose you’re writing a novel that is set in the Deep South in 1955 and your protagonist is an immigrant facing prejudice and roadblocks at every turn.
What Higher Consciousness Really Means, How We Attain It, and What It Does for the Human Spirit
“[Leonardo da Vinci’s] unique brain wiring … allowed him the opportunity to experience the world from the vantage point of a higher dimension,” Leonard Shlain wrote in his stimulating inquiry into the source of Leonardo’s genius. But what is “higher consciousness,” really, and can it be unmoored from the baggage of spiritualism and superstition to enrich our secular understanding of what it means to be human? Few contemporary thinkers have done more to reinstate philosophy as a guiding light for public life and a practical tool for personal growth than philosopher and School of Life founder Alain de Botton, who has written beautifully about such enduring ideas as the role of art in human happiness and what Nietzsche teaches us about the character-building role of difficulty. De Botton’s fantastic recent conversation with Tim Ferriss pointed me to this equally fantastic video essay examining the question of higher consciousness.
Pyramid Texts Online - Library
Come in and make yourself comfortable. Select a book from the list below to load into the reading window. If you need help call Bennu by clicking on the cartouche of Unas at the top of the page. Use the arrows on the bottom right of the screen to turn the pages. Alternatively, you can click on the pages with your mouse to move back and forth. You can also jump to another part of the book by clicking on the page edges.
Book of Enoch
Translated from Ethiopic by Richard Laurence, London, 1883. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 2425 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 48a49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 7273 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 9697 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 104a 105 Enoch Chapter 1 Enoch 1:1 The word of the blessing of Enoch, how he blessed the elect and the righteous, who were to exist in the time of trouble; rejecting all the wicked and ungodly. Enoch, a righteous man, who was (1) with God, answered and spoke, while his eyes were open, and while he saw a holy vision in the heavens. This the angels showed me.
World-building
I’ve been busy worldbuilding this week. It’s one of my favorite things to do in the process of writing sci-fi, and it makes me all giddy and drooly like a kid that’s been dropped into a toybox. Since I revisited my collected materials for the worlds I’m writing in, and have overhauled one of these entirely, I grabbed the opportunity to put together a list of important worldbuilding questions to share with you.
Masonic E-Book Library
Note: Many of the e-books in this library are several hundred pages long and include illustrations. It takes a minimum of a high-speed DSL or cable modem to download many of them. i.e. Mackey's Masonry Defined takes 3 minutes just to download the text. A Message from our Librarian Max Heindel - Rosicrucian Mysteries_An Elementary Exposition of their Secret Teachings
Wesley Center-Noncanonical Literature
Noncanonical Literature Documents to Aid Students and Scholars in Biblical Interpretation including Introductions and Summaries of Many Noncanonical Works Non-Canonical Literature Disclaimer The Bible is an invaluable collection of sacred ancient texts, written and assembled over several hundreds of years by numerous authors. These texts were written to particular people living at a definite time and place who shared common experiences and knowledge.
Using Pictures as Writing Prompts
Choose one of these images to use as a writing prompt for a freewriting session. Ideally, you'll develop one of the ideas generated by your freewriting session into a short story. A reader named Adam C. described how this played out for him in a creative writing class in which each student was given a different photo to write about. Adam writes, "The picture I was given portrayed an elderly couple, holding hands, looking off to the left of the camera lens. There was a large boat in the background.
