Famous Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers By Maria Popova By popular demand, I’ve put together a periodically updated reading list of all the famous advice on writing presented here over the years, featuring words of wisdom from such masters of the craft as Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller, Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Susan Orlean, Ernest Hemingway, Zadie Smith, and more. Please enjoy. Jennifer Egan on Writing, the Trap of Approval, and the Most Important Discipline for Aspiring Writers “You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly… Accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.”
Inside Lascaux: Rare, Unpublished - Photo Gallery The story is so improbable, so marvelous, that it feels more like the remnant of a dream, or a half-remembered myth, rather than something that unfolded within living memory. . . . September 12, 1940. A warm afternoon in southwestern France. As two schoolboys hunt rabbits on a ridge covered with pine, oak and blackberry brambles, their dog, Robot, excitedly chases a hare down a hole in the ground beside a downed tree. As boys will, the youngsters begin to dig, widening the hole, removing rocks — until they find themselves not merely in another world, but another time. In the cool dark beneath the known world, the boys discover “a Versailles of prehistory” — a vast series of caves, today collectively known as Lascaux, covered with wall paintings roughly 17,000 years old. “LIFE re-opened its Paris bureau after the second World War ended, in the same offices we rented before the war” Morse said. “The first sight of those paintings was simply unbelievable,” Morse said.
Tackle Any Issue With a List of 100 The List of 100 is a powerful technique you can use to generate ideas, clarify your thoughts, uncover hidden problems or get solutions to any specific questions you’re interested in. The technique is very simple in principle: state your issue or question in the top of a blank sheet of paper and come up with a list of one hundred answers or solutions about it. “100 Ways to Generate Income”, “100 Ways to be More Creative” or “100 Ways to Improve my Relationships” are some examples. “One hundred entries? Isn’t that way too many?” Bear with me: it’s exactly this exaggeration that makes the technique powerful. When starting your list you may believe that there’s no way to get it done. Unlike the related Idea Quota tool — whose primary goal is to acquire the habit of coming up with ideas — the goal of a List of 100 is to take your mind by surprise. Ground Rules There are only two simple principles to keep in mind when making Lists of 100: 1. 2. The Dynamics of Making Lists of 100 1. 2. 3.
Books [Updated: June 21, 2008] The following are books which have made the most impact on my life. I’m finding myself repeatedly recommending these to people. Here they are in one place so you too could reference them. Want to change your life situation? Creativity Clarity The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle (This book shifted my thinking and changed my life. Happiness Flow: Psychology of Optimal Experience (Psychology of happiness)Are You Ready to Succeed? Productivity Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (classic on being more effective)The 4-Hour Workweek (alternative concepts from traditional thinking: Lifestyle design. User Experience: Marketing, Selling & Business: E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It (Highly recommended for anyone thinking about or is starting a businesses. Click here to see my current Reading List See my Bookstore.
The Daily Routines of Famous Writers By Maria Popova UPDATE: These daily routines have now been adapted into a labor-of-love visualization of writers’ sleep habits vs. literary productivity. Kurt Vonnegut’s recently published daily routine made we wonder how other beloved writers organized their days. So I pored through various old diaries and interviews — many from the fantastic Paris Review archives — and culled a handful of writing routines from some of my favorite authors. Ray Bradbury, a lifelong proponent of working with joy and an avid champion of public libraries, playfully defies the question of routines in this 2010 interview: My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. Joan Didion creates for herself a kind of incubation period for ideas, articulated in this 1968 interview: I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. E. I never listen to music when I’m working. Photograph by Tom Palumbo, 1956
25 Ways To Fight Your Story’s Mushy Middle For me, the middle is the hardest part of writing. It’s easy to get the stallions moving in the beginning — a stun gun up their asses gets them stampeding right quick. I don’t have much of a problem with endings, either; you get to a certain point and the horses are worked up into a mighty lather and run wildly and ineluctably toward the cliff’s edge. But the middle, man, the motherfucking middle. It’s like being lost in a fog, wandering the wasteland tracts. And I can’t be the only person with this problem: I’ve read far too many books that seem to lose all steam in the middle. Seems like it’s time for another “list of 25″ to the rescue, then. Hiyaa! 1. Fuck the three-act structure right in its crusty corn-cave. 2. Hey, when you fake an orgasm, you gotta commit. 3. The shape of a story — especially the shape of a story’s middle — is a lot of soft rises and doughy plateaus and zoftig falls. 4. 5. 6. Sometimes, a story just needs blood. 7. 8. Find approximate middle of book. 9. 10. 11.
Diamond Dogs « Pushing Ahead of the Dame Diamond Dogs.Diamond Dogs (live, 1974).Diamond Dogs (live, 1976).Diamond Dogs (live, 1996).Diamond Dogs (live, 2004). They’d taken over this barren city, this city that was falling apart. They’d been able to break into windows of jewelers and things, so they’d dressed themselves up in furs and diamonds. David Bowie, on “Diamond Dogs,” 1993. Where I lived was with my dadda and mum in the flats of municipal flatblock 18A, between Kingsley Avenue and Wilsonway. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange. “Diamond Dogs” has never sounded quite right: a sordid, overlong Rolling Stones imitation, someone else’s nightmare inflicted with malice upon you. Audiences didn’t know what to make of it. The germ of “Diamond Dogs” came from Bowie’s father, Haywood Jones, who had worked at Dr. A Clockwork Orange was again central (see “Suffragette City”), not only in Bowie’s droogs-like “Dogs” and their Alex-like leader, Halloween Jack, but in the song’s setting—a ruined, post-apocalyptic modernist building.
Build A Curved-Wall Glass-Block Shower This beautiful bath-improvement project is dedicated to the millions of do-it-yourselfers who've always dreamed of building with glass block, but didn't have the foggiest idea of where to start. That's right. You can build a gorgeous glass-block shower even if you've never laid a single block. Three kit styles are available. Preparing The Pan For our project, we hired a plumber to relocate the shower drain, run new water-supply lines and install the shower pan. Install the shower pan before the finished wall material (i.e., ceramic tile, solid-surface material, stone). Once the pan is in place, prepare it for the first course of block by roughening the top surface of the curb with 80-grit sandpaper (Photo 1). The shower kit comes with slotted metal straps, called panel anchors. Bend three anchors to form L-shaped brackets. Stand the anchors back into position and secure each with a single 2-in. screw and washer (Photo 2), but don't tighten the screws all the way just yet. Finishing Up
Books to Brighten Your New Year That time slot after the local news doesn’t matter. As Kimmel, Fallon, and Colbert will soon show, Late Night’s all about YouTube, Twitter, and engaging with audiences on the Internet. In a deleted scene from Pulp Fiction, Mia Wallace tells Vincent Vega her theory that the world is made up of only two kinds of people: Beatles people and Elvis people. For decades, the late-night talk show landscape operated in much the same way. But with Leno gone and Letterman announcing his retirement, those distinctions are no more. In 1992, your late-night options were Letterman and Leno, period. When Letterman lost the Tonight Show job to Leno in 1991 (Leno took over for Johnny Carson a year later), one mark against him had been concern over whether Letterman’s puckish routine could translate to a “traditional” 11:30 audience. In 2010, months after passing the Tonight Show baton to O’Brien, NBC did it again, panicking that Leno’s staid Tonight audience was rejecting the sharper O’Brien.