Saturday, April 21, 2012

the joy of reading



i saw this on brain pickings and i liked it so much i made my own version...
sans the digital magic though.


Wednesday, April 11, 2012

advice from the masters

Thanks to my subscription to Brain Pickings I get to read about wonderful and amazing things about art, writing, science and the like. Here's the latest post from their site that I'd like to share to my fellow writers:


Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story

by 
“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
  1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
  2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
  3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
  4. Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.
  5. Start as close to the end as possible.
  6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
  7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
  8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.