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Viewing all posts tagged "writing"
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”Finally, one wonders why epigraphs are always at the beginning of the book. Some stories end and make you want to hold the book to your chest and absorb it directly into your very soul. How moving it would be to me to finish a book and turn the page, sad that it’s all over and read an epigraph that reflects on all that’s come before.
Andrew Tutt, writing on epigraphs today in The Millions.
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Long Live Fiction: A Guide to Fiction Online
The internet isn’t killing fiction! While it may be shrinking attention spans, it’s also giving new writers a change to grow and learn from one another. David Backer takes a look at several such communities for The Millions.
One of the sites he mentions is Fictionaut, which is invitation-only. I really like it. I received an invitation a little while ago and already have a story up: Driving Directions.
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Ten rules, an edited list
The Guardian has published a list of various writers’ own personal rules of writing. Via bobulate, who’s taken the time to further distill the Guardian’s list into a very brief and helpful form.
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”We have to look at our own inertia, insecurities, self-hate, fear that, in truth, we have nothing valuable to say. When your writing blooms out of the back of this garbage compost, it is very stable. You are not running from anything. You can have a sense of artistic security. If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.
Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
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”And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
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Finch: A Primer on Novel Openings (Please Chime In)
Jeff VanderMeer gives a master class in writing the beginning of a novel. This is a fascinating look at how real writers write, and very educational. It’s particularly encouraging to see some of his early, discarded openings and compare them to the finished product. It’s a reminder that first drafts don’t need to be perfect, just finished.
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”We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.
J.G. Ballard (via nihilnoetia, via booklover)
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”The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off.
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, transl. Linda Asher (Perennial, 2000), 18. (via enormousair, via libraryland, via booklover)
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Slow progress is still progress
Robin Sloan launched his Kickstarter project on August 26 with 4,500 words. By November 18, 84 days later, he had a stack of boxes filled with the printed book.
Now, granted, Annabel Scheme is a 30,000-word novella and not the huge beast I’m working on. (I passed 40,000 words the other night.) On the other hand, 84 days from start to finish is pretty impressive. I’ve been working on this book for more than a year now — beginning in October 2008, when I first sat down and wrote the three paragraphs that now open what’s currently the book’s third chapter.
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”What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it.
Dave Eggers gives a long and fascinating rant back in 2000 to a journalist asking questions about his supposed “selling out” with AHWOFG. (via matthewb)
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Call in Sick More Often
Jamie Ford, author of the NYT bestseller Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, starts with the release of his first novel and traces its development backwards in time for three years, arriving at last at the spark that got it going: calling in sick to write for a day.
Not that I’m really entertaining any ideas about that right now, but — I can at least admit — it’s inspiring. And tempting, too, honestly.
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”Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction? It’s a scream. It’s written like this: “I checked out with K19 on Abadabaran III, and stepped out through the crummaliote hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Bryllis ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains. The Bryllis shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn’t enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn’t enough. He was right.” They pay brisk money for this crap?
Mystery writer Raymond Chandler, writing a letter to his friend H.N Swanson in 1953. Honestly Chandler’s fake-SF is better than a lot of the real stuff.
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The Fiction Generator
Trying to come up with a great idea for your next SF/fantasy story? Check out this handy chart. One caveat, though — all the protagonists are male, so some gender-switching might be in order.
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Crazy Friend by Jonathan Lethem
Lethem details his boyhood obsession with Philip K. Dick, and how the sci-fi genius helped launch his own career as a writer.
Likes
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this is how I want to camp.
sweethomestyle:Camping (via redmann)
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“These Machines Kill Fascists” designed by You and Me, The Royal We
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ADA ad designed by Jeseok Yi
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where do I get trunks like that??
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Just saw a foursquare check-in to a church. I’m not sure God appreciates other people trying to...
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