A wonderful series of Ira Glass videos on the art of storytelling: Note: Just to be clear, I saw this over at “Your Daily Awesome” but I wanted to re-create it for my own readers and archive for my own site
{ 0 comments }
Posts tagged as:
writing
While reading the April 2007 issue of Harper’s I came across an excerpt of an interview [subscription required] between Tom LeClair, professor of English at University of Cincinnati, and William Gaddis, the famous author. LECLAIR: How do the novels get to be so long, if they don’t start out with mass in mind? GADDIS: If [...]
{ 0 comments }
Living in the countryside of Northern California when I was about 12, going through some of the things my parents had stuffed into my large bedroom closet because their own large bedroom closet was stuffed to overflowing, I discovered a boxed set of 5 Vonnegut books from the 70s – my dad’s books. The covers [...]
{ 3 comments }
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html  And my own personal vietnam: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/affect.html I can NEVER keep these two words straight. Now I’ll go there everytime I need to know whether I should be using AFFECT or EFFECT. The site will have a good affect…er…effect…ah crap…it’s gonna help my writing.
{ 1 comment }
I posted an essay by George Orwell that talked about the craft of writing and how simplicity should be strived for. Here is a related essay also about the craft of writing, in this case written by Kurt Vonnegut. He echoes many of the same thoughts raised by Orwell. http://www.harmonize.com/probe/aids/manual/style.htm Keep it simple. Keep it [...]
{ 1 comment }
Matthew Baldwin, ex-Amazonian and hilarious writer/blogger, has written a piece for “The Morning News” about a collection of experiences he had with dogs when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia: Before I joined the Peace Corps, I thought I knew dogs. Loveable. Loyal. Affable. Man’s best friend. In Bolivia, I met dogs: the [...]
{ 0 comments }
I just discovered a lovely blog with a provocative literary angle. Written by Julie Wilson from Toronto, Canada, Seen Reading is her little peep-show into the reading lives of others. It’s her creative amalgamation of a person she saw reading, a quote from the work, and literary interpretation of what she imagines the person must [...]
{ 0 comments }
The decline and fall of the English Language. This is an extraordinary essay written in 1946 by George Orwell: Politics and the English Language – read it. If you are a writer and wish to improve your craft, I recomend it highly. In fact I can think of little else that would be of higher [...]
{ 4 comments }
As kids in junior high some of my friends and I used to play this game where we’d lie around at night and tell outlandish collaborative stories. One person would start with a line or two, then the second would do the same, and on and on through everyone present. If you refused to play, [...]
{ 0 comments }
William Burroughs coined the phrase “language is a virus.” The way he obsessed over its manipulations, you’d understand why he came to that conclusion. Via Lifehacker this morning, I discovered a website by the same name (languageisavirus.com), which is filled with helpful tools to help you cut writer’s block. One of my all time favorite [...]
{ 0 comments }
