Character Chart. FAVORITES Color: Music: Food: Literature: Expressions: Book: Quote: Expletive(s) (swears): Mode of transportation: HABITS Smokes: What? How often? Drinks: What? How often? Worst bad habit? Quirks: BACKGROUND Hometown: Type of childhood: First memory: Most important childhood event that still affects him/her: Why? Lower education: Higher education: Booksmart or streetsmart? SELF-PERCEPTION One word character would use to describe self: One paragraph description of how character would describe self: What does character consider best physical characteristic? Immediate goal(s): Long range goal(s): How does character plan to accomplish goal(s)?
How character react in a crisis (calm/panic/etc.)? Jewelry? Owns a computer? © (c ) copyright 1990-2011 Rebecca Sinclair ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Authors Note: I worked hard on this. Words of Wisdom: 101 Tips from the World's Most Famous Authors. If you've ever wanted to sit down with your favorite writer and ask advice, then you should take a look at these tips from some of the most famous authors in the world.
These valuable bits of information provide guidance on strengthening your writing skills, becoming a better fiction writer or poet, learning to tap into your creativity, advice on education and school, and even a few suggestions on success and living a meaningful life. Of course, another excellent way of improving your writing is through traditional or online master’s degrees in creative writing.
General Writing Tips Improve any type of writing you do with these solid tips from successful writers themselves. Ernest Hemingway. Use short sentences and short first paragraphs. These rules were two of four given to Hemingway in his early days as a reporter–and words he lived by.Mark Twain. Tips for Beginning Writers Stephen King. Fiction Tips Kurt Vonnegut. Poetry Robert Frost. Tips for Creativity Annie Dillard. Lifelong Learning. 25 Things You Should Know About Storytelling.
1. Stories Have Power Outside the air we breathe and the blood in our bodies, the one thing that connects us modern humans today with the shamans and emperors and serfs and alien astronauts of our past is a heritage — a lineage — of stories. Stories move the world at the same time they explain our place in it. They help us understand ourselves and those near to us. Never treat a story as a shallow, wan little thing. A good story is as powerful as the bullet fired from an assassin’s gun. 2.
We love to be entertained. 3. Segmentation. 4. Story is also not a square peg jammed in a circle hole. 5. You put your hand in a whirling clod of wet clay, you’re shaping it. 6. A story is so much more than the thing you think it is. 7. The storyteller will find no original plots. 8. The audience wants to feel connected to the story. 9. The audience isn’t stupid. 10. Conflict is the food that feeds the reader. 11. 12. It’s not just tension. 13.
The story you tell should be the story you tell. 14. 15. 25 Things Every Writer Should Know. An alternate title for this post might be, “Things I Think About Writing,” which is to say, these are random snidbits (snippets + tidbits) of beliefs I hold about what it takes to be a writer.
I hesitate to say that any of this is exactly Zen (oh how often we as a culture misuse the term “Zen” — like, “Whoa, that tapestry is so cool, it’s really Zen“), but it certainly favors a sharper, shorter style than the blathering wordsplosions I tend to rely on in my day-to-day writing posts. Anyway. Peruse these. Absorb them into your body. Let your colonic flora digest them and feed them through your bloodstream to the little goblin-man that pilots you. Feel free to disagree with any of these; these are not immutable laws. Buckle up. 1. The Internet is 55% porn, and 45% writers. 2. A lot of writers try to skip over the basics and leap fully-formed out of their own head-wombs. 3. 4.
I have been writing professionally for a lucky-despite-the-number 13 years. 5. Luck matters. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 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. 20 Basic Plots For Story Generators - Software Secret Weapons. The 20 Basic Plots are collected by the Tennessee Screenwriting Association . After you come up with your own system for generating ideas, the next step is to put them in some recognizable story form (the basic plot idea), build your central conflict (the story premise sheet), then build your character and underlying themes (the thematic premise sheet). 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
(Note: Sometimes #19 & #20 are combined into rags-to-riches-to-rags (or vice versa) of a Protagonist who does (or doesn't) learn to deal with their dominating character trait). Looking At People Through Their Words illustrates the use of artificial intelligence and data mining for text analysis. Having the right merchant account and hosting including providers of dedicated servers which can also provide data recovery is the key the maximum uptime for your website. Untitled. The technology we put between ourselves and others tends to always create additional strains on communication, even as it enables near-constant, instant contact. When it comes to our now-primary mode of interacting — staring at each other as talking heads or Brady Bunch-style galleries — those stresses have been identified by communication experts as “Zoom fatigue,” now a subject of study among psychologists who want to understand our always-connected-but-mostly-isolated lives in the pandemic, and a topic for Today show segments like the one above.
As Stanford researcher Jeremy Bailenson vividly explains to Today, Zoom fatigue refers to the burnout we experience from interacting with dozens of people for hours a day, months on end, through pretty much any video conferencing platform. (But, let’s face it, mostly Zoom.) We may be familiar with the symptoms already if we spend some part of our day on video calls or lessons. Related Content: Writing Tips by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell. Image by Austin Kleon Here's one way to become a better writer. Listen to the advice of writers who earn their daily bread with their pens.
During the past week, lists of writing commandments by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard (above) and William Safire have buzzed around Twitter. (Find our Twitter stream here.) So we decided to collect them and add tips from a few other veterans -- namely, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, and Neil Gaiman. Here we go: Henry Miller (from Henry Miller on Writing) 1. George Orwell (From Why I Write) 1. Margaret Atwood (originally appeared in The Guardian) 1. Neil Gaiman (read his free short stories here) 1. William Safire (the author of the New York Times Magazine column "On Language") 1. Related Content: Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001) John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspiring Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech Elmore Leonard’s Ultimate Guide for Would-Be Writers. Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction.
Image by Lloyd Arnold via Wikimedia Commons Before he was a big game hunter, before he was a deep-sea fisherman, Ernest Hemingway was a craftsman who would rise very early in the morning and write. His best stories are masterpieces of the modern era, and his prose style is one of the most influential of the 20th century. Hemingway never wrote a treatise on the art of writing fiction. He did, however, leave behind a great many passages in letters, articles and books with opinions and advice on writing. Some of the best of those were assembled in 1984 by Larry W. 1: To get started, write one true sentence.
Hemingway had a simple trick for overcoming writer's block. Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. 2: Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next. 5: Don't describe an emotion--make it. Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001) Like fellow genre icon Stephen King, Ray Bradbury has reached far beyond his established audience by offering writing advice to anyone who puts pen to paper. (Or keys to keyboard; "Use whatever works," he often says.)
In this 2001 keynote address at Point Loma Nazarene University's Writer's Symposium By the Sea, Bradbury tells stories from his writing life, all of which offer lessons on how to hone the craft. Most of these have to do with the day-in, day-out practices that make up what he calls "writing hygiene. " Watch this entertainingly digressive talk and you might pull out an entirely different set of points, but here, in list form, is how I interpret Bradbury's program: Don't start out writing novels. Related content: Ray Bradbury: Literature is the Safety Valve of Civilization The Shape of A Story: Writing Tips from Kurt Vonnegut John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspiring Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech.
John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspiring Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech. Today is the 110th birthday of writer John Steinbeck, whose great novel of the 1930s, The Grapes of Wrath, gives an eloquent and sympathetic voice to the dispossessed. In 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception.
" You can watch him deliver his Nobel speech above. And for insights into how Steinbeck reached that pinnacle, you can read a collection of his observations on the art of fiction from the Fall, 1975 edition of The Paris Review, including six writing tips jotted down in a letter to a friend the same year he won the Nobel Prize. “The following," Steinbeck writes, "are some of the things I have had to do to keep from going nuts. " 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. "As you write," Steinbeck says, "trust the disconnections and the gaps.
Related content: Writing Tips by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell.