CALLIHOO Writing Helps--Feelings Table. Character Feelings You can describe your character's feelings in more exact terms than just "happy" or "sad. " Check these lists for the exact nuance to describe your character's intensity of feelings. SF Characters | SF Items | SF Descriptors | SF Places | SF EventsSF Jobs/Occupations | Random Emotions | Emotions List | Intensity of Feelings. Ruth Gerson: How to Write a Song: For Writer's Block or Beginners. From: San Francisco Vocal Coaching's "Singing, Songwriting and Performance" Class (I've also taught it at Princeton University.) How To Write A Song, Exercise 1 (for beginners, or for writer's block): Write a letter to someone you feel intensely about something you feel intensely about.
If you don't feel intensely about anyone or anything, pretend you are someone else: a character from a book, a play, or a painting, or someone else you know. Use a spiral notebook and write six to ten single sided pages on the right hand side, leaving the left sides blank. Don't stop writing; even if you have to write, "I don't know what to say. " Write "I am writing to you in blue ink. When you are done, read your letter over, circling or underlining sentences, words, fragments that jump out at you (use a different color ink, or highlighter).
If you no longer have room on the left page after this, rip out a third page and put it above your letter pages. List word associations. 25 Things You Should Know About Character. Previous iterations of the “25 Things” series: 25 Things Every Writer Should Know 25 Things You Should Know About Storytelling And now… Here you’ll find the many things I believe — at this moment!
— about characters: 1. Without character, you have nothing. 2. A great character can be the line between narrative life and story death. 3. Don’t believe that all those other aspects are separate from the character. 4. The audience will do anything to spend time with a great character. 5. It is critical to know what a character wants from the start. 6. It doesn’t matter if we “like” your character, or in the parlance of junior high whether we even “like-like” your character. 7. It is critical to smack the audience in the crotchal region with an undeniable reason to give a fuck. 8. You must prove this thesis: “This character is worth the audience’s time.” 9.
Don’t let the character be a dingleberry stuck to the ass of a toad as he floats downriver on a bumpy log. 10. 11. 12. 13. The law of threes. » New York Times 50 Most Challenging Words (defined and used) - Currently Obsessed. The New York Times recently published a list of 50 fancy words that most frequently stump their readership. They are able to measure this data thanks to a nifty in-page lookup mechanism, which you can try here. Try double-clicking the word “epicenter”. Since the NYT didn’t include definitions of these words, I decided to post a job to MediaPiston to produce an article defining and using each word in the list.
Voila! Just a few hours later, here it is. The New York Times 50 Fancy Words (defined and used) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. Why date a writer « Rebecca Rosenblum – Rose Coloured. October 7th, 2010 I’m really going to try to cut down on the number of email forwards I use as posts here, but I can’t help it; this one is funny! Some of this stuff is just untrue slanders, but not #6 and #13! Of course, one solution to all this is just for writers to date other writers, so that both partners’ quirks will cancel each other out and you’ll be totally charmed by each others’ pretensions.
I’m just sayin’… EDIT #2: I originally posted this with a request for proper attribution, and Nicole kindly provided it–the author is Kathryn Vercillo and she originally posted the list here. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. Advice to writers by Vonnegut. How to Write With Style by Kurt Vonnegut Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style. These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time.
Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful --- ? Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head. 1. Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. 2. I won't ramble on about that. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. That is the bad news. 8. 20 obsolete English words that should make a comeback. Photo: Katherine Hodgson If we all start using them, these words can be resurrected.
DURING MY UNDERGRADUATE studies as a Linguistics major, one of the things that struck me most is the amazing fluidity of language. New words are created; older words go out of style. Words can change meaning over time, vowel sounds shift, consonants are lost or added and one word becomes another. Living languages refuse to be static.
The following words have sadly disappeared from modern English, but it’s easy to see how they could be incorporated into everyday conversation. Words are from Erin McKean’s two-volume series: Weird and Wonderful Words and Totally Weird and Wonderful Words. 1. Verb trans. – “To confuse, jumble” – First of all this word is just fun to say in its various forms. 2. 3. Verb trans. – “To scrape together; to gather together from various sources” – I’m sure this wasn’t the original meaning of the word, but when I read the definition I immediately thought of copy-pasting. 4. 5. 6. 7. What Does it Mean That the Majority of ASME Finalists Are Men? - National.
The National Magazine Award finalists have been announced, one day after NYU announced the predominantly male 100 most outstanding journalists of the past 100 years. And like NYU's list, the ASME's are pretty male-dominated. Unfortunately, it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that men are taking home the lion's share of the awards in categories like profile writing, feature writing, reporting, and essays and criticism.
After all, women's literary organization VIDA crunched the numbers of female vs. male bylines in a range of magazines back in February and found that, yep, by and large, more men than women are published as contributors, "even if," as Megan O'Rourke writes in Slate, "the ratios at literary journals are notably less lopsided than those at more politics and current events-oriented magazines. " So, what do we make of this? Are women simply not represented in those other categories? Image via Shutterstock by Carlos Caetano. » Finding Your Voice. Post written by Leo Babauta. Creators of any kind must find their voice. We are writers, musicians, designers, programmers, parents, builders of anything. But we are not truly expressing ourselves, and speaking the truth, until we’ve found our voice: the tone, style, tenor, pitch, personality we use to express ourselves.
Our voice is our essence, writ plain for the world to see. A reader and fellow writer asked me how I found my voice. But I feel I’ve found something that has the texture of truth, even if only a tactile approximation. I’m learning, and I hope my learning helps yours. Experiment boldly. Learn to hear yourself. Getting that voice from your head to the virtual paper — that’s the trick. Find what feels true. Find clarity. Remove the noise. Most people also have too much noise in their lives to hear their own thinking. Use your voice. You must use your voice. I write of simplicity in a world that’s needlessly complicated. I write of minimalism to stem the tide of consumerism. Phraseup* - find the right words. 25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing. I read this cool article last week — “30 Things To Stop Doing To Yourself” — and I thought, hey, heeeey, that’s interesting.
Writers might could use their own version of that. So, I started to cobble one together. And, of course, as most of these writing-related posts become, it ended up that for the most part I’m sitting here in the blog yelling at myself first and foremost. That is, then, how you should read this: me, yelling at me. If you take away something from it, though? Then go forth and kick your writing year in the teeth. Onto the list. 1. Right here is your story. 2. Momentum is everything. 3. You have a voice. 4. Worry is some useless shit. 5. The rise of self-publishing has seen a comparative surge forward in quantity. 6. I said “stop hurrying,” not “stand still and fall asleep.” 7. It’s not going to get any easier, and why should it? 8. 9. The mind is the writer’s best weapon. 10. 11. 12. Writers are often ashamed at who they are and what they do. 13. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 14.