Creative Writing
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By 3G1B DH: A list recently published in The New York Times by a noted restaurateur gave 100 rules for what service staff should not do. I thought a list of 50 things that writers shouldn’t do would give us all a chance to vent. I’m contributing 10 items. Some of these pet peeves have pissed me off for years: Don’t use italics for more than one line.
50 Things a Writer Shouldn't Do & Three Guys One Book
Ten Obvious Truths About Fiction
The following essay was previewed in the class that Stephen Graham Jones taught for LitReactor, Your Life Story Is Five Pages Long . 1. The reader should never have to work to figure out the basics of your story. Who’s whose wife or husband, what the time period is if that matters, why these people have broken into this house, and on and on, just the basic, ground-level facts about your story. If you don’t relay that stuff up-front, as quickly and efficiently as possible (and please don’t be fancy), then your story becomes a game of three-card-monty, with you hiding information under this or that shell, trying to keep everything moving fast enough that nobody knows what’s going on. Which is to say your story becomes about the reading of the story, not the experience the story is trying to get the reader to engage.You are a short story. You start in the middle maybe, and you don’t have a long word count. A few pages. A short arc. A gimmick.
You Are A Short Story, He Was A Novel
Poetry
Ernest Hemingway once said “All American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” As much as we love our Ernest, we beg to differ. It’s not just the amazing books Americans have written, which cause us to contradict Papa’s viewpoint. It’s the words of wisdom these masters have shared about their craft.
Seven great writing quotes from seven great American writers
36 Writing Essays by Chuck Palahniuk | LitReactor
1: Establishing Your Authority Chuck teaches two principal methods for building a narrative voice your readers will believe in. Discover the Heart Method and the Head Method and how to employ each to greatest effect. 2: Developing a Theme At the core of Minimalism is focusing any piece of writing to support one or two major themes. Learn harvesting, listing, and other methods, after a fun excursion into the spooky side of Chuck's childhood.
Short Story Unit
In 1985, a library in Holland banned one of Charles Bukowski 's books: Tales of Ordinary Madness . The library officials said the work was "very sadistic, occasionally fascist and discriminatory against certain groups (including homosexuals)." Bukowski responded with this brilliant letter, featured today on Letters of Note : In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see. If I write of "sadism" it is because it exists, I didn't invent it, and if some terrible act occurs in my work it is because such things happen in our lives.
Bukowski's letter to a library that banned his books - Boing Boing
English 50 – Intro to Creative Writing: Exercises for Poets First Lines: The King James Bible has long been recognized for its importance to English literature. Choose a verse from the Bible and write your own poem with the Bible verse as the first line. You can use the blank verse of the Bible as a basis for developing rhythm, the subject matter of the verse to develop theme and metaphor. Take a line from someone else's poem, presumably one you admire, and use it as the first line for your own poem, again adapting rhythm, subject matter, metaphor.
English 50 - StumbleUpon
Thirty Question Character Survey|National Novel Writing Month
NaNo Tips & Strategies Reference Desk Researching facts, figures, real world experiences and details.Can a hearse carrying a corpse drive in the car-pool lane?
English 50 – Intro to Creative Writing: Exercises for Story Writers
Exercises for Fiction Writers - Page 2 - StumbleUpon
English 50 – Intro to Creative Writing: Exercises for Story Writers
English 50 Exercises for Story Writers - StumbleUpon
Creating Fictional Characters—Part 4: Fleshing Out Characters with Tags, Tr...
You’ve got some basic ideas of what your character is like: gender, age, vocation, manner. As described in Finding and Creating Characters , you’ve given your character a problem, a need. Now you’re ready to flesh the character out.Image from Flickr by Lazurite This is not particularly relevant to the post, but I’m getting an awful lot of comments telling me, often a little snarkily, “it’s ‘THAT’ not ‘WHICH’”. The “don’t use which for restrictive clauses” rule comes (as far as I can tell) from Strunk and White. Plenty of authors, including Austen, have used “which” exactly as I use it in the title. It’s very commonly used like this here in England, so I’m guessing my comments are coming from US readers. There was never a period in the history of English when “which” at the beginning of a restrictive relative clause was an error.