Benjamin Franklin's Phonetic Alphabet
Benjamin Franklin took great interest in the promotion of spelling reform. While living in London in 1768 he wrote A Scheme for a new Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling in which he proposed a fairly accurate phonetic system for spelling English. The alphabet was published in 1779 in Franklin's Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces.
The Psychology of Flow: What Game Design Reveals about the Deliberate Tensions of Great Writing
By Maria Popova A full creative life requires equally that we cultivate a capacity for boredom, as legendary psychoanalyst Adam Phillips asserted, and learn to welcome rather than avoid difficulty, as Nietzsche believed. Great stories, like great life-stories, are woven of the same interplay between fertile ennui and surmountable frustration — so argues writer Peter Turchi in one especially rewarding section of the altogether stimulating A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic (public library | IndieBound). In a sentiment that illuminates the psychological machinery behind Nabokov’s famous assertion that “a good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader,” Turchi recounts poet C. Dale Young’s experience of reading and rereading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: The first time he read it, he said, the book seemed perfectly clear.
20 Tips For Writing a Captivating Short Story (Part 1)
by Mindy Halleck Today, as I edit, trim, cut, and otherwise obliterate a short story I wrote that ended up to be 8,000 words, but needs to be 5,000 words, I am reminded of this quote: “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” -Henry David Thoreau
18 Quotes for Writers from Ernest Hemingway
Today marks the 115th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s birth. In his lifetime, Papa had quite a lot to say about writing. Here are 18 of our favorite quotes, in no particular order.
Digital Storytelling: What it is… And… What it is NOT
I was lucky to have shared my childhood bedroom for a few years with my grandmother, when she had come to live with us after an illness. At bedtime, she would tell me stories of her parents and three brothers and growing up in East Prussia, fleeing to the West after WW2 and the things that occupied her mind. I was hooked on storytelling. The fascination grew when technology became available and opened up possibilities that were just not possible before. I would give anything to have been able to record my grandmother’s stories and have shared them with my own children years later.
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Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling
Note: This article is included in our year-end storytelling advice round-up. A while back, now-former Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats tweeted a series of pearls of narrative wisdom she had gleaned from working at the studio. This list of 22 rules of storytelling was widely embraced as it was applicable to any writer or anyone who was in the business of communicating (which is pretty much everyone, including software developers). And much of its advice (e.g. "You gotta keep in mind what's interesting to you as an audience, not what's fun to do as a writer.
Another Cotton Picking Day! by Norris Chambers (Old Timer's Tales)
Very few people under the age of "Senior Citizen" have ever picked cotton. The cotton patch is now harvested by machine, about the same way as grain, potatoes and other back breaking gatherings. But it wasn't always that way.
Nabokov on Inspiration and the Six Short Stories Everyone Should Read
by Maria Popova “A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life.” “Show up, show up, show up,” Isabel Allende advised, “and after a while the muse shows up, too.”
