Kurt Vonnegut's Daily Routine
by Maria Popova “In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me.” As a lover of letters and of all things Kurt Vonnegut, I spent months eagerly awaiting Kurt Vonnegut: Letters (public library), which has finally arrived and is just as fantastic as I’d come to expect. What makes the anthology particularly sublime is that strange, endearing way in which so much of what Vonnegut wrote about to his friends, family, editors, and critics appears at first glance mundane but somehow peels away at the very fabric of his character and reveals the most tender boundaries of his soul. Here’s a taste: In the mid-1960s, Vonnegut was offered a teaching position at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Dearest Jane,In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me. Compare and contrast with Henry Miller’s daily routine. Donating = Loving
STOP IT RIGHT NOW
No culpes a nadie (Pablo Neruda) | Amor y Desamor
Titulo: No culpes a nadie Autor: Pablo Neruda (Poeta Chileno, 1904-1973) Nunca te quejes de nadie, ni de nada, porque fundamentalmente tu has hecho lo que querías en tu vida. Acepta la dificultad de edificarte a ti mismo y el valor de empezar corrigiéndote. El triunfo del verdadero hombre surge de las cenizas de su error. Nunca te quejes de tu soledad o de tu suerte, enfréntala con valor y acéptala. No te amargues de tu propio fracaso ni se lo cargues a otro, acéptate ahora o seguirás justificándote como un niño. No olvides que la causa de tu presente es tu pasado así como la causa de tu futuro será tu presente. Aprende de los audaces, de los fuertes, de quien no acepta situaciones, de quien vivirá a pesar de todo, piensa menos en tus problemas y más en tu trabajo y tus problemas sin eliminarlos morirán. Levántate y mira el sol por las mañanas y respira la luz del amanecer. Fuente Original: Pablo Neruda.
Famous Writers on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary
by Maria Popova Reflections on the value of recording our inner lives from Woolf, Thoreau, Sontag, Emerson, Nin, Plath, and more. “You want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you,” Madeleine L’Engle counseled in her advice to aspiring writers. W.H. Auden once described his journal as “a discipline for [his] laziness and lack of observation.” Journaling, I believe, is a practice that teaches us better than any other the elusive art of solitude — how to be present with our own selves, bear witness to our experience, and fully inhabit our inner lives. It was also her way of learning to translate the inner into the outer, the subjective into the universal: This personal relationship to all things, which is condemned as subjective, limiting, I found to be the core of individuality, personality, and originality. The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Donating = Loving
Sherman Alexie: The Top 10 Pieces of Writing Advice I've Been Given
Photo by Larry D. Moore: CC BY-SA 3.0 National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie’s birthday is Sunday, and his new title Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories was released this week. To celebrate the short-story writer (War Dances), poet (The Business of Fancydancing) and novelist (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian), here’s some advice Alexie shared with us in the magazine (which also included pieces by Erik Larson, Chuck Palahniuk and many others). Happy Friday. And happy birthday, Sherman. The Top 10 Pieces of Writing Advice I’ve Been Given (Or That I’ll Pretend Were Given to Me) by Sherman Alexie [10] Don’t Google search yourself. [9] When you’ve finished Google searching yourself, don’t do it again. [8] Every word on your blog is a word not in your book. [7] Don’t have any writing ceremonies. [6] Turn your readings into events. [5] Read 1,000 pages for every one you try to write. [4] In fiction, research is overrated. [2] Subscribe to as many literary journals as you can afford.
Kurt Vonnegut term paper assignment from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop
Buck Squibb. Suzanne McConnell, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s students in his “Form of Fiction” course at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, saved this assignment, explaining that Vonnegut “wrote his course assignments in the form of letters, as a way of speaking personally to each member of the class.” The result is part assignment, part letter, part guide to writing and life. This assignment is reprinted from Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield, out now from Delacorte Press. This course began as Form and Theory of Fiction, became Form of Fiction, then Form and Texture of Fiction, then Surface Criticism, or How to Talk out of the Corner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro. As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I invite you to read the fifteen tales in Masters of the Modern Short Story (W. Proceed next to the hallucination that you are a minor but useful editor on a good literary magazine not connected with a university.
Le blog de M. Carré « un strip par jour, cinq jours par semaine
2-Minute Chocolate Chip Cookie For One « Recipe
This is one of those ‘I-need-a-cookie-right-now-or-I-die’ recipes that can be prepared in almost no time.We all know that kind of situation, don’t we? I definitely do, I confess.And you know what? This impressive cookie not only takes less than 5 minutes to prepare, it tastes really delicious. Just like a good chocolate chip cookie.The preparation is beyond easy… just have a look… First you need this stuff. 1. 2. 3. 4. Save a few for the top, if you wish to.5. Ta-dah! 6.
Famous Writers’ Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity, Visualized
by Maria Popova The early bird gets the Pulitzer … sort of. “In both writing and sleeping,” Stephen King observed in his excellent meditation on the art of “creative sleep” and wakeful dreaming, “we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.” Over the years, in my endless fascination with daily routines, I found myself especially intrigued by successful writers’ sleep habits — after all, it’s been argued that “sleep is the best (and easiest) creative aphrodisiac” and science tells us that it impacts everything from our moods to our brain development to our every waking moment. I found myself wondering whether there might be a correlation between sleep habits and literary productivity. First, I handed them my notes on writers’ wake-up times, amassed over years of reading biographies, interviews, journals, and other materials. Donating = Loving Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter.
