Hard-up writers cheat with them, indescreetly. Dressed in rain coats, they walk straight through the store to the Language section and the writing instruction books, a seedy bookshelf corner where ideas are being peddled for cheap. The writers stand there so they can be propositioned by the titles: The Write-Brain Workbook: 366 Exercises to Liberate Your Writing, The Writer’s Idea Book, Unjournaling: Daily Writing Exercises that Are NOT Personal, NOT Introspective, NOT Boring!. Liberated writing? Not sure what that is, but it sounds good. Not boring? Yeah, I don’t want my work to be boring. Ideas? I don’t have any. I’ll take them all! What these publishers are selling is addictive – in high demand — and writers are willing to pay top dollar for mind-blowing inspiration. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Writing Instruction
PF Post
April 17th, 2009
Here’s a little ditty (ditty????) that I wrote for PlattForm Advertising. We’re trying to have a little more fun with our press releases. That is the nature of the company, so it might as well show in the release. Wouldn’t you like to work here … I mean, there?
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Tags: PlattForm
We were all ugly. We were average intelligence, at best, but mostly stupid. We were never under any pressure to succeed. The boys might grow up to be decent laborers or good with tools. The girls might work in offices assisting important people. Some of us would be dead before high school or in jail permanently before 19. But we knew who those kids were, and they were the friendliest ones. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Childhood
Inside the birthday card, they’d scribbled his favorite word, Guinness, and written something about hoping he would finally lose his virginity. The envelope was scribbled on, too. His name was in the center in block letters with sharp-leaning shadows behind them: M-A-R-K. They’d spent a few seconds adding smiley faces, some with stick bodies and a couple striking poses with triangle-shaped boobs. Around those, some hearts were added in different sizes but all swollen and about to burst at the center. In one corner was a sun with a happy face in it, but it’d been poorly drawn. The face was surrounded by limp sunrays so it could be a smashed spider with dotted eyes and a mouth on its back. Read the rest of this entry »
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The greatest mystery that mystery writer Gregory McDonald ever put over on readers was his hands-off, bordering-on-absent writing style. The author of The Fletch series almost entirely relies on dialogue in his novels. His books read similar to screenplays with little scenery description and sparse characterization. He explained in this interview excerpt his thoughts about the role a writer should assume as storyteller:
“The magic I attempt is to point the finger, as concisely as possible set the scene, then pull back my hand, disappear as the author, leave the reader alone with the characters. Of course the result of this is, not typical of authors, that tens of millions more people know the names of my characters than know my name, which I don’t mind a bit.”
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Tags: Quotes
