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Let the story decide | Writers Victoria. Thursday, September 3, 2015 By: Danielle Wood interviewed by Michelle McLaren One look at Danielle Wood’s impressive list of achievements will tell you everything you need to know - she’s one of Australia's most accomplished, multi-talented writers. We’re lucky enough to have Danielle teaching two courses this September: Short Stories and the Goldilocks Zone; and in Mornington, Short Fiction and Fairy Tale. Writers Victoria intern, Michelle McLaren caught up with Danielle to ask her about short stories, fairy tales, the Tasmanian writing scene and more… Short stories are everywhere at the moment.

I don’t really know the answer to that, but I have to say the signs are encouraging! As an award-winning author of both short stories and novels, how do you decide whether a particular idea would be best expressed as a short story, or whether it could (or should) be drawn out into something longer? I don’t mean to sound mystical, but in a sense, it’s the story itself that decides. Yes! Everyone Needs a Writing Tribe. 10 Instagram Tips for Writers | Aerogramme Writers' Studio10 Instagram Tips for Writers. A guest post by Rowena Wiseman The problem with being a writer is the act of writing is boring. Look here I am at my laptop, writing. Oh again, I’m at my laptop, writing. I’m drinking a long black coffee out of an aqua blue cup. I’m typing on my laptop. So when I came across #bookstagram I was like, finally, this is something I can contribute to! Instagram is a great way to connect with other #booklovers. Here are my best tips for how writers on Instagram can use #bookstagram: Search through #bookstagram #bookphoto #bookphotography and find some accounts that you like.

Follow Rowena Wiseman on Instagram Rowena Wiseman writes contemporary fiction, young adult and children’s stories. Read Rowena’s advice for using Wattpad, the world’s largest community of readers and writers. Book to the future | where literature lives forever. Angela AckermanWRITERS HELPING WRITERS™ About Angela Ackerman Angela Ackerman is a bestselling author, writing coach, and creative entrepreneur. She loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. Emotional Wounds: Being Trapped in a Collapsed Building When you’re writing a character, it’s important to know why she is the way she is. 5 Tips for Success as a Self-Published Author We are so excited to have Susan Kaye Quinn here today, and the topic is very appropriate. Writer’s Key To Success: Make Your Own Luck (Case Study) In 2012, I wrote a post at Janice Hardy’s blog, Fiction University. Emotional Wounds: Overly Critical or Strict Parents When you’re writing a character, it’s important to know why she is the way she is.

Launching One Stop For Writers: Will You Help? You know that twisty tightness deep in your core when your release day is approaching, or you’ve just sent your novel to an agent, or you’re submitting to a critique group for the first time? Why Is Your Character’s Emotional Wound So Important? Online Classes | Creative Nonfiction. Tell your story, better. Creative Nonfiction's online classes give you the opportunity to learn in a small classroom environment on your own time.

Write at night, on your lunch break... even in your underwear. All you need is an Internet connection and a little motivation. Participants receive personalized feedback on assignments from their instructor, as well as responses from classmates on discussion board forums. All instructors are university professors and/or working professional writers--and there are never more than 14 students in any class.

Conversation, firm deadlines, and feedback help keep you writing and improving your work throughout the class. Whether you're just starting out or looking for an advanced class to help you refine and polish your work, we have a course for you. See what past students have to say about our growing writing community. Fall Classes: Now Enrolling September 14 - November 22 Advanced Memoir & Personal Essay - Curriculum A (10-week class) NEW! Food Writing. A Look Inside Hannah Arendt’s Personal Library: Download Marginalia from 90 Books (Heidegger, Kant, Marx & More)

It does seem possible, I think, to overvalue the significance of a writer’s library to his or her own literary productions. We all hold on to books that have long since ceased to have any pull on us, and lose track of books that have greatly influenced us. What we keep or don’t keep can be as much a matter of happenstance or sentiment as deliberate personal archiving. But while we may not always be conscious curators of our lives’ effects, those effects still speak for us when we are gone in ways we may never have intended.

In the case of famous—and famously controversial—thinkers like Hannah Arendt, what is left behind will always constitute a body of evidence. And in some cases—such as that of Arendt’s teacher and onetime lover Martin Heidegger’s glaringly anti-Semitic Black Notebooks—the evidence can be irrevocably damning. Related Contents: Enter the Hannah Arendt Archives & Discover Rare Audio Lectures, Manuscripts, Marginalia, Letters, Postcards & More. Sexism in publishing: 'My novel wasn’t the problem, it was me, Catherine' Almost 20 years after Francine Prose investigated whether “women writers are really inferior” in her explosive essay Scent of a Woman’s Ink, the author Catherine Nichols has found that submitting her manuscript under a male pseudonym brought her more than eight times the number of responses she had received under her own name.

In an essay for Jezebel, Nichols reveals how after she sent out her novel to 50 agents, she received just two manuscript requests. But when she set up a new email address under a male name, and submitted the same covering letter and pages to 50 agents, it was requested 17 times. “He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book. Fully a third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in 25,” writes Nichols.

Responses from agents to Catherine Nichols included comments such as “beautiful writing, but your main character isn’t very plucky, is she?” “Although I run @read_women ... Get a Library Card: Hannah Kent’s Rules for Writing | Aerogramme Writers' StudioGet a Library Card: Hannah Kent's Rules for Writing. Victorian Slang - Language Dossier. Victorian prudery sometimes went so far as to consider it improper to say "leg" in mixed company; instead, the preferred euphemism “limb” was used.

There is a myth that furniture such as tables were covered with embroidery and tablecloths so that table legs were hidden from view, but no historical evidence suggests that this was actually practised. Words such as "devil" and "damned" were blanked out in books. Verbal or written communication of emotion or sexual feelings was often proscribed so people instead used the language of flowers. The language of flowers, sometimes called floriography, was a Victorian-era means of communication in which various flowers and floral arrangements were used to send coded messages, allowing individuals to express feelings which otherwise could not be spoken.

This language was most commonly communicated through Tussie-Mussies, an art which has a following today. Taboo Language It is assumed that the Victorians were quite a prudish lot. The Septic's Companion - List of British Words For People. 56 Delightful Victorian Slang Terms You Should Be Using. In 1909, writing under the pseudonym James Redding Ware, British writer Andrew Forrester published Passing English of the Victorian era, a dictionary of heterodox English, slang and phrase.

"Thousands of words and phrases in existence in 1870 have drifted away, or changed their forms, or been absorbed, while as many have been added or are being added," he writes in the book's introduction. "‘Passing English’ ripples from countless sources, forming a river of new language which has its tide and its ebb, while its current brings down new ideas and carries away those that have dribbled out of fashion.

" Forrester chronicles many hilarious and delightful words in Passing English; we don't know how these phrases ever fell out of fashion, but we propose bringing them back. 1. Afternoonified A society word meaning “smart.” 2. A figure of speech used to describe drunken men. 3. Thieves used this term to indicate that they wanted “to go out the back way.” 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Brave or fearless. 10. 25 Life Changing Lessons To Learn From Rumi. By Luminita Saviuc “Study me as much as you like, you will not know me, for I differ in a hundred ways from what you see me to be. Put yourself behind my eyes and see me as I see myself, for I have chosen to dwell in a place you cannot see.” ~ Rumi Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, also known as Rumi, was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic who, in my personal opinion, wrote some of the most beautiful and most profound words that were ever written.

You won’t believe it how much wisdom and how so much power there is in his words. It’s incredible. Today I would like to share with you 25 life changing lessons to learn from Rumi, lessons that have the power inspire and empower you to live a more authentic, beautiful, loving and meaningful life. Enjoy 1. “You were born with potential.

“You sit here for days saying, This is strange business. “Why should I stay at the bottom of a well when a strong rope is in my hand?” “Become the sky. “Do you know what you are? 2. 3. 4. The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature's Most Epic Road Trips. The above map is the result of a painstaking and admittedly quixotic effort to catalog the country as it has been described in the American road-tripping literature. It includes every place-name reference in 12 books about cross-country travel, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), and maps the authors’ routes on top of one another. You can track an individual writer’s descriptions of the landscape as they traveled across it, or you can zoom in to see how different authors have written about the same place at different times.

Most interestingly of all, for me at least, you can ruminate about what those differences say about American travel, American writing, American history. A word to close readers: I hand-typed most of these 1,500-plus entries and located their coordinates as best I could. Some were difficult to track down. To be included, a book needed to have a narrative arc matching the chronological and geographical arc of the trip it chronicles. Aldous Huxley Reads Dramatized Version of Brave New World. Put One Word After Another: Neil Gaiman’s Eight Rules of Writing | Aerogramme Writers' StudioPut One Word After Another: Neil Gaiman's Eight Rules of Writing. WritePut one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right.

When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. About Neil GaimanNeil Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre and films. His notable works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. The Art of Writerly Procrastination, or How I Write My Books While Appearing to Do Nothing | Aerogramme Writers' StudioThe Art of Writerly Procrastination; or, How I Write My Books While Appearing to Do Nothing. Paddy O’Reilly is an Australian writer of fiction, non-fiction and screenplay.

Her latest novel, The Wonders, is published in the United States this week by Washington Square Press. Here she shares an insight into her writing process. Allow me to introduce you to one of the ways I spend my writing time – observing chickens. My two chooks are called Toni and Guy. I named them after a hairdressing firm in honour of their excellent plumage. When I’m writing, I often find it necessary to spend time with Toni and Guy. As I pick my way through my garden tasks, they meander in my wake, tilting their heads to see better because their vision is alien to mine. The time I spend with Toni and Guy isn’t about getting ideas, or working out problems in my writing, although those things may happen. When I’m with Toni and Guy, I too am practising the art of attention. So Toni and Guy are, in a way, part of my writing practice.

On other days, they only produce this: They carry on regardless. Home — RealTalk. Opinionator.blogs.nytimes. How To Self-Publish A Bestseller: Publishing 3.0. Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and several-times entrepreneur. His latest book, “Choose Yourself!” (foreword by Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter) came out on June 3. Follow him on Twitter @jaltucher. My most recent book, “Choose Yourself!” Sold 44,294 copies in its first month out [update: just tipped over 100,000 copies as of Dec 30] , hit the Wall Street Journal Bestseller list, was No. 1 on Amazon for all non-fiction books for a few days and is still flirting with No. 1 in its various categories.

This post is about what I did differently, why I did it differently, and how I think anyone can do this to self-publish a bestseller. I describe all the numbers, who I hired and why, and how I made the various choices I did. Every entrepreneur should self-publish a book, because self-publishing is the new business card. Unfortunately, most people suck at it. The distinction now is no longer between “traditional publishing” versus “self-publishing.” More money. The power of a great introduction - Carolyn Mohr. Writers come in all shapes and sizes, from every country in the world, and are practically every age.

Some people write about history, some write science fiction, and some write about things that are happening in this very moment. Regardless of what kind of writer you are (or want to become), you should seek the advice of those that are already doing it (and you'll probably find some that say you shouldn't be a writer). Find some resources that can help you in your journey. An introduction is the first paragraph of a written research paper, the first thing you say in an oral presentation, or the first thing people see, hear, or experience about your project or book. Here is a guideline for writing a literary analysis. YOUR TV GUIDE on WRITERS GROUPS. Tawnya Bhattacharya is currently a writer/co-producer on NBC’s The Night Shift, and formerly wrote on TNT’s Perception, The Client List at Lifetime and on USA’s Fairly Legal, with her writing partner, Ali Laventhol.

Follow Tawnya on Twitter @ScriptAnatomy. Click to tweet this article to your friends and followers! Overall, I’m pro writers groups. I’m part of an awesome one currently. We are five writing entities (six writers total, since I’m a part of a team), well balanced between males and females, working writers and those on the verge, and we all write drama. After writing this I asked our writer’s group to say what they liked about our group and why they thought we worked, so you’ll see some of those quotes throughout this article. Fresh Eyes on your Work Sometimes you’ve written so many versions of something that no longer know what’s working in your script and what isn’t. More Brains, the Better for Brainstorming With Sometimes two (or three or four) heads are better than one.

Sarah Waters’ Ten Rules for Writing Fiction | Aerogramme Writers' StudioSarah Waters' Ten Rules for Writing Fiction. The Psychology of Flow: What Game Design Reveals about the Deliberate Tensions of Great Writing. 9 Literary Magazines for New and Unpublished Writers | Aerogramme Writers' Studio9 Literary Magazines for New and Unpublished Writers. Charles Dickens’s annotations reveal the 'Rosetta Stone' of Victorian literature. What's in a Name? 5 Authors and Their Pseudonyms. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The Strangest Writing Contest Around: The Culture Surrounding "It Was A Dark And Stormy Night" Old School Monopoly Has Nothing On Writing Your First Book!

4 Free, On-Demand Writing Webinars. Writing | Arts Tasmania. Cube Creator. How Walking Fosters Creativity: Stanford Researchers Confirm What Philosophers and Writers Have Always Known. 7 Books That Will Change The Way You See The World. Always innovative Toronto Public Library lets us check out humans as well as books. Untitled. Harper Lee's social insight rests on storytelling genius. Quotes to Combat Writer's Block. 6 Free Writing Podcasts. The Truth About Blogging | Nourishing Plot. Last-minute attempt to sneak “snippet tax” into copyright report. Random Name Generator. 23 Perfect Words For Emotions You Never Realised Anyone Else Felt. Sonder: The Realization That Everyone Has A Story.

When Resistance Pays You a Compliment. Here Are Some Odd Facts About Pretty Much Every Children’s Book You’ve Ever Heard Of. 10 Children’s Books You Should Read As An Adult. Amazon Is Completely Changing Self-Publishing... Possibly How We Write Too! 630 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. Free ebooks by Project Gutenberg - Gutenberg. 700 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. FREE BOOKS: 100 legal sites to download literature. Go With the Flow: Learn How Your Writing Can Hit the Sweet Spot With Readers. According to Stephen King, It's All in the Opening Line - The Reader's Nook.

Tech Tools for Writers: Storyometer. Writing Resources. What Librarians Wish You Knew About How To Use The Library. Tech Tools for Writers: Creatavist. You'll Be Surprised At What's Missing! Lexical Lacunae: Words We Should Have But Don't. These 7 Books Look Like Nothing You’ve Ever Seen! - The Reader's Nook. Is This Book Going To Destroy The Novel As We Know It? Should You Have A Self-Hosted Blog Instead Of Using WordPress.com? Reda Report adopted: A turning point in the copyright debate. How to Publish on Wattpad. A Positive Alternative to Banning Books. The 12 Weirdest Reasons For Banning Science Fiction and Fantasy Books. Banned Books Week: the 10 most challenged books every year since 2000.

Down With Censorship! 11 Quotes From Authors About The Tragedy of Book Banning. The Psychology of Writing and the Cognitive Science of the Perfect Daily Routine. Daily Page. Dear Writer: 5 Tips to Better Query Letters. Banned Books By The Numbers (INFOGRAPHICS) 12 Banned Books Every Woman Should Read. How Many of These Top 15 Banned Books Have You Read? Number 10 Shocked Me! 7 free tools for anyone who wants to become a better writer. Robert Jackson Bennett - The Strategies That Helped Me Write 3 Books in 3 Years. Back to the Story Spine | Aerogramme Writers' StudioBack to the Story Spine. | The story begins in The Lane. How the subconscious mind shapes creative writing. 16 Fancy Literary Techniques Explained By Disney. New project will investigate Australia's love affair with romance fiction - Communications & Media - University of Tasmania, Australia. Huxley's Letter to Orwell Regarding "1984"

Keeping Your Books Available | Authors Alliance. The Book of Kells: ‘The most purely Irish thing we have’ – James Joyce. Writing Quotes from Women, People of Color, Genre Writers. Tim Winton: 'By the time I was five I knew. Hospital was trouble' Self-publishing matters – don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Orion Magazine | Live Event: Robert Macfarlane and Rebecca Solnit on Nature Writing. Newyorker. Guest Post: How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day. Get Your Writing Fighting Fit Chapter 3.

I Write for Apples: Scrivener - Keywords. The Ultimate Student Resource List. How to Use Pocket Like a Pro to Save Everything from the Web | Lifehacker UK. Voice Dream Writer Proofs Your Writing With Text-To-Speech.