Blog

Tag: writing

  • October 21st, 2012 10:15pm

    In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring’, the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.

    — Stephen King. “On Writing”. (via fuckyeah-unclesteve)

  • September 30th, 2012 2:52pm

    Well, the idea of a single protagonist, I never could understand too well. What I’ve felt is that problems are multi-personal, they involve us all, there’s no such thing as a private problem…it’s only a form of ignorance. When I wake up in the morning, and I fall over the chair and break my nose, and I’m broke, and my wife’s left me – it’s my ignorance that makes me thing I’m an entire universe and that these miseries are my own and they’re not affecting the rest of the world. If I could only look down from a satellite, I would see all the world, everybody getting up and, in some analogous way, falling over a chair and breaking something..

    — Philip K. Dick

  • September 30th, 2012 2:16am

    Now, I don’t know how deeply to go into this, in this letter. The intuitive – I might say, gestating method by which I operate has a tendency to cause me to ‘see’ the whole thing at once…Mozart operated this way. The problem for him was simply to get it down. If he lived long enough, he did so; if not, then not. In other words, according to me (but not according to you people) my work consists of getting down that which exists in my mind; my method up to now has been to develop notes of progressively greater completeness. If I believed that the first jotting-down actually carried the whole idea, I would be a poet, not a novelist; I believe that it takes about 60,000 words for me to put down my original idea in its absolute entirety.

    — Philip K. Dick (in a letter to Eleanor Dimoff about his view on writing. Taken from Paul Williams’ introduction to “Confessions of a Crap Artist”)

  • September 7th, 2012 7:37am

    Rushing was the very last thing his words seemed to be doing; indeed, for one whose profession and social status it was to be a writer, he was making miserably slow progress, and no one could have watched him without reaching the conclusion that a writer is a man to whom writing comes harder than to anyone else.

    —

    Tristan by Thomas Mann (via tsumetaihikari) 

    Just finished reading this in one of the lit classes I’m taking. Definitely my favorite of Mann’s stories. 

  • August 26th, 2012 12:54am

    Pro-tip for writers,

    because I’ve been seeing this a lot. 

    To be is the most common of the linking verbs and also the most overused, but all the linking verbs invite generalization and distance. To feel, to seem, to look, to appear, to experience, to express, to show, to demonstrate, to convey, to display – all these suggest in fiction that the character is being acted upon or observed by someone rather than doing something. She felt happy/sad/amused/mortified does not convince us. We want to see her and to infer her emotion for ourselves. He very clearly conveyed his displeasure. It isn’t clear to us. How did he convey it? To whom?

    Most linking verbs have active as well as effectively passive forms, and it is important to distinguish them. She felt sad is effectively passive, but she felt his forehead is an action. If the magician appeared, he is acting; but if he appeared annoyed, then the verb is a linking verb and the only action implied is that of the observer who perceives this. 

    Linking verbs, like the passive voice, can appropriately convey a sense of passivity or helplessness when that is the desired effect. 

    From Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway