Procrastination Station. Next stop: Slackerville.
Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.
— Stephen King, On Writing (via aflightlessdreamer)
(via keyboardsmashwriters)
(via writeworld)
Source: copyblogger.com
#I want to print this and hang it on my face #writing #inspiration #advice![theatlantic:
Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Via Brainpickings/Reddit [Photo: AP]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1yj6dkvRo1qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Via Brainpickings/Reddit [Photo: AP]
(via artiststoolbox)
Source: The Atlantic
#Kurt Vonnegut #tips #advice #writingI don’t know the origin of the “write what you know” logic. A lot of folks attribute it to Hemingway, but what I find is his having said this: “From all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive.” If this is the logic’s origin, then maybe what’s happened is akin to that old game called Telephone. In the game, one kid whispers a message to a second kid and then that kid whispers it to a third and so on, until the message circles the room and returns to the first kid. The message is always altered, minimized, and corrupted by translation. “Bill is smart to sit in the grass” becomes “Bill is a smart-ass.” A similar transmission problem undermines the logic of writing what you know and, ironically, Hemingway may have been arguing against it all along. The very act of committing an experience to the page is necessarily an act of reduction, and regardless of craft or skill, vision or voice, the result is a story beholden to and inevitably eclipsed by source material.
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Why fiction’s narrative and emotional integrity will always transcend the literal truth
(A wonderful article, particularly for beginning writers, filled with true things. Go and read it at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/08/don-rsquo-t-write-what-you-know/8576/)
(via neil-gaiman)
Source: The Atlantic
#writing #advice #neil gaiman #quoteThere are about 5,300 ASK messages right now sitting in the queue. Which is why yours hasn’t been answered, I expect.
One question I keep seeing over and again, even more than “What MFA program should I do?” (I do not answer this, because my answer would probably be: “I have no idea. I never did…
Source: The Atlantic
#advice #neil gaiman #he always gets my pen back on the paper #inspirational