Lire et écrire
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Author practices jumping rope with seaweed while work awaits. ``. . . anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment." -- Robert Benchley, in Chips off the Old Benchley, 1949 I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time?
Structured Procrastination
I never could have listed these in a single sitting, yet seeing it here — I could not imagine anything else. When in doubt, remember how to do what you love . What is it?
Bobulate
Elmore Leonard : Using adverbs is a mortal sin 1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long.
Ten rules for writing fiction | Books | guardian.co.uk
On words alone - Bobulate
Writing more than anything else is a way of clarifying one’s thoughts; the initial act is not for the reader: [W]riting worth reading is the product, at least to some degree, of this extraordinarily intimate confrontation between the disorderly impressions in the writer’s mind and the more or less orderly procession of words that the writer manages to produce on the page. But the negotiation of being “public” might change how writers feel about their own words:
Alone, With Words | The New Republic
Writers write in order to be read. This is obvious. But the speed with which words, once written, are now being read—a speed shaped by technological innovations long before the Internet turned the quick turnaround into the virtually instantaneous turnaround—has set me to thinking about the extent to which writing, for the writer, ought to have a freestanding value, a value apart from the reader.
A lways read with a pen in hand. The pen should be used both to mark the text you want to remember and to write from where the text leaves you. Think of the text as the starting point for your own words. Reading and writing are not discrete activities; they occur on a continuum, with reading at one end, writing at the other.
Ways of reading / from a working library
HOWTO: Read more books (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
I’ve read a hundred books a year for the past couple years. Last time I mentioned this, a couple people asked how I could read so many books. Do I read unusually quickly? Do I spend an unusual amount of time reading? I did a simple calculation: The average person spends 1704 hours a year watching TV.
The Walrus
Lynda Barry visited Toronto recently to speak at a book festival, and to teach her class on creative writing, “Writing the Unthinkable.” In her lively festival talks — which felt more like happenings than your typical button-down, staid author’s reading — she presented excerpts from her latest book, What It Is , asked the audience to shout their first phone numbers out loud, and sang “You Are My Sunshine” with her mouth closed.