Questionnaires for Writing Character Profiles - Creative Writing Help Enter your e-mail to get the e-book for FREE. We'll also keep you informed about interesting website news. "I have searched the web and used different worksheets, but none have come close to your worksheets and descriptions of (what to do and what not to do). Both courses I have taken have with Creative Writing Now have been amazing. "As usual - I already love the course on Irresistible Fiction, rewriting a lot and improving greatly even after the first lesson. “Essentials of Fiction proved that I could indeed write and I wrote every day, much to my boyfriend's dismay (waa sniff).” - Jill Gardner "I am loving the course and the peer interaction on the blog is fantastic!!!" "I'm enjoying the weekly email course, Essentials of Poetry Writing. "Thank you for all the material in this course. "I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the lessons and feel they were very helpful in introducing new ideas and perspectives to my writing. "Thanks very much for this course. "Thank you so much!!
Searching for the best dictionary. - By YiLing Chen-Josephson It can be a challenge to get at what sets a dictionary apart from its peers. First, you have to move beyond the marked family resemblance (thumb index tabs, speckled pages, and a preference for the name Webster), the swaggering jacket copy ("The most useful dictionary you can own," "The most up-to-date dictionary available," "America's favorite dictionary," etc.), and the shrink-wrap put in place to encourage you and your grubby hands to judge a book by its cover alone. Then you must read indefatigably through scads of introductory material and reference supplements, weigh the merits of different line drawings of jerboas and lazy tongs and the like, and, above all, look up words you know over and over again. I, unencumbered by gainful employment and needing to be kept off the streets, am the very definition of a person up for this challenge. Before I tell you the results of my tests, there are some hard questions you should ask yourself about what it is that you want from a dictionary.
The F|R Interview: Y Combinator’s Paul Graham Editor’s note: For the sake of accuracy, we have replaced the edited questions and answers with their unedited version (save for some minor stylistic changes). We sincerely apologize for any confusion. This week Found|READ interviews software entrepreneur Paul Graham, co-founder of the influential startup incubator, Y Combinator. Since 2005, Y Combinator has seed-funded 250 founders and over 45 startups including Justin.TV, RescueTime, Weebly and Zecter. F|R: What is the mathematical function from which Y Combinator takes its name, and why did you choose this? Graham: It’s a function that builds recursive functions without them needing to have names. F|R: How quickly can you now tell whether a startup will make it? Graham: We can never tell for sure. I think the key quality is determination. Graham: There are a few things they haven’t copied correctly, but really it’s not our model that distinguishes us. Graham: You’re confusing two separate things. Graham: We discovered it by accident.
Amazing Women Rock - 10 Tips For Writing Life Stories That People Want To Read Susan notes: I asked my friend, author and prolific writer Jo Parfitt to share some tips on storytelling and writing. Here are her top 10 for writing Life Stories that people want to read. When you conduct an interview you will nearly always ask more questions than you need, and spend more time interviewing than is necessary. These tips will help you to conduct an amazing interview: 1) Ask fewer than ten questions and be sure that those questions are open (they won’t get you a yes or no answer). 2) If you do an email interview then encourage your interviewee to write in full sentences. 3) Go ‘quote spotting’. 4) Don’t be frightened to ask your interviewee to slow down so that you can write those amazing quotes down accurately. 5) Find ways to paint a picture. 6) Include the things your amazing woman says, but also use quotes from her books, articles, or Youtube videos, perhaps. 7) Read other interviews. 8) Remember, this is a story. 10) Ask for advice.
Disgareeing with Paul Graham Paul Graham has provided a primer on types of disagreement, from name-calling through ad hominem to refutation. This is helpful, because I disagree with something he wrote recently, and I want to do it properly. (Interjection for non-initiates: Paul Graham is a computer programmer who sold a startup to Yahoo in 1998. Now he's an investor with Y Combinator, which provides seed funding for startups. I'm certainly not qualified to disagree with Graham on the subjects of computers, programming languages, or startup companies. I'm going to disagree with an essay on a more general topic: "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss." "The most powerful form of disagreement is to refute someone's central point," Graham tells us. How does Graham back up this contention? Direct observation first: Graham saw some big-company programmers in a café, and they looked less alive than the startup founders he works with. One problem with direct observation is that it's hard to get a representative sample.
Nerd Paradise : How to Write a 20 Page Research Paper in Under a Day Posted on: 10 Cado 7:0 - 5.27.29 So you've procrastinated again. You told yourself you wouldn't do this 2 months ago when your professor assigned you this. Pick a Topic The more "legally-oriented" your topic is, the better. Make a list ...of every possible outcome that this issue could cause in...the near future...the far future...of every person that this topic affects....of any instances where this topic has come in the news....what you would do about this topic if you had the chance/power/enough-sugar...any little detail you can think ofThe important thing about this is to think of ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING, no matter how silly or far-fetched. Reorder everything Put your most obvious argument first. Then put weird off the wall stuff, regardless of importance. Put the strongest argument for your case next. Now list the incidents that will help argue for your point. Now, list everything that could be construed to be the answer to the question "if elected, what would you do about this issue?"
Cities and Ambition May 2008 Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder. The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising answers. That's not quite the same message New York sends. How much does it matter what message a city sends? You can see how powerful cities are from something I wrote about earlier: the case of the Milanese Leonardo. If even someone with the same natural ability as Leonardo couldn't beat the force of environment, do you suppose you can? I don't. I'd always imagined Berkeley would be the ideal place—that it would basically be Cambridge with good weather. As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. Not all cities send a message. Notes
15 Oxymorons" An oxymoron is a combination of words that contradict each other. Here are some of our favorites. 1. virtual reality 2. original copy 3. old news 4. act naturally 5. pretty ugly 6. living dead 7. jumbo shrimp 8. rolling stop 9. constant variable 10. exact estimate 11. paid volunteers 12. civil war 13. sound of silence 14. clever fool 15. only choice Helen Davies, Marjorie Dorfman, Mary Fons, Deborah Hawkins, Martin Hintz, Linnea Lundgren, David Priess, Julia Clark Robinson, Paul Seaburn, Heidi Stevens, and Steve Theunissen
How to Disagree March 2008 The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts. Many who respond to something disagree with it. The result is there's a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. If we're all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well. DH0. This is the lowest form of disagreement, and probably also the most common. u r a fag!!!!!!!!!! But it's important to realize that more articulate name-calling has just as little weight. The author is a self-important dilettante. is really nothing more than a pretentious version of "u r a fag." DH1. An ad hominem attack is not quite as weak as mere name-calling. Of course he would say that. This wouldn't refute the author's argument, but it may at least be relevant to the case. DH2. DH3. This is often combined with DH2 statements, as in: DH4. DH5. DH6.
Cities based on ideas are made of straw... and why Paul Graham i Paul Graham recently wrote a piece about cities. He puts forth Cambridge as a city of ideas, New York as a city that is all about money (where people doing startups are second class citizens) and the Valley as a place for startups. I’m not about to start comparing the Valley to New York City. That’s just silly, because the Valley has a multi-generational head start on creating tech startup companies. However, given that, it does make me wonder why Cambridge and the Boston Area is so far behind the Valley, because Route 128 has been a tech center since the late 1950’s. I think the fact that Cambridge is a city of ideas is exactly why you could say it’s questionable how great a place it is to do a startup. Also, think about it another way. Ideas today are a commodity. Which brings me back to New York City. When I think of ideas, I think of creativity, not just scholarly research and publication in academic journals. We even solve creative engineering problems here.
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss March 2008, rev. June 2008 Technology tends to separate normal from natural. I began to suspect this after spending several years working with startup founders. Though they're statistically abnormal, startup founders seem to be working in a way that's more natural for humans. I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. Trees What's so unnatural about working for a big company? Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in groups of several hundred. Companies know groups that large wouldn't work, so they divide themselves into units small enough to work together. These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure. In practice a group of people are never able to act as if they were one person. Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this. Corn Syrup It's not your boss's fault. Notes
Paul Graham - from social shyness to patronizing Hi ! it’s Cecil here. (A copy of this post is also available on heavy mental) I’ve been quite upset lately by a few essays from every blogger’s darling : Paul Graham. How art can be good (ouch !) The problem appears when he leaves his area of expertise. I was just as uncomfortable reading lies and kids : it reads as if he doesn’t have any, or they just are abstract incarnations of the child concept. Paul just jumped the shark with the last one on Cities. As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. Thinking about a intellectual capital of the world is useless. Hackers are not Painters (thanks God!) So far I didn’t really feel like blogging anything about that since Paul still is referenced on a regular basis on some of my favorite blogs. To which I’d add, what hackers and painters don’t have in common is everything else. Writing a blog post ranting about something is one thing. Great mind drowning Hackers definitely are neither artist nor philosopher.
The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company July 2008 At this year's startup school, David Heinemeier Hansson gave a talk in which he suggested that startup founders should do things the old fashioned way. Instead of hoping to get rich by building a valuable company and then selling stock in a "liquidity event," founders should start companies that make money and live off the revenues. Sounds like a good plan. Let's think about the optimal way to do this. One disadvantage of living off the revenues of your company is that you have to keep running it. The main economic motives of startup founders seem to be freedom and security. The best case, for most people, would be if you could hire someone to manage the company for you once you'd grown it to a certain size. There will of course be some founders who wouldn't like that idea: the ones who like running their company so much that there's nothing else they'd rather do. Sure, running your own company can be fairly interesting. So far so good. Good news: they do exist.
The Python Paradox August 2004 In a recent talk I said something that upset a lot of people: that you could get smarter programmers to work on a Python project than you could to work on a Java project. I didn't mean by this that Java programmers are dumb. Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. Only a few companies have been smart enough to realize this so far. A friend of mine who knows nearly all the widely used languages uses Python for most of his projects. At the mention of ugly source code, people will of course think of Perl. So far, anyway.