February 2012
5 posts
“I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes...”
– Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. (via riverran)
#mary shelley #this quote though #it’s all kinds of wonderful #hey remember that time one asswipe was like you have 30 seconds to name something invented by a woman… #…and Mary was like SCIENCE FICTION MOTHERFUCKERS #that was awesome #thanks Mary Shelley...
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jetpackexhaust:
kinkengineering:
jetpackexhaust:
That wonderful feeling when you realize you haven’t discovered a deep and horrible hollowness of doubt about your ability, you’ve just written through lunch again. So you eat something and write more and feel brilliant!
Does everything about the process of writing also apply to designing latex? Seems to be so.
Let’s see:
- Joyous...
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January 2012
4 posts
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Flaws (Excellent Example of Writing with Patterns)
I like how you mispronounce words sometimes, how you fumble and stammer and stutter looking for the right ones to say and the right ways to say them. I appreciate that you find language challenging, because it is, because everything manmade is challenging. Including man, including you.
When you sleep on your side, I like to map the constellations between your beauty marks freckles pimples, the...
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13 Rules
by Chuck Palahniuk
Twenty years ago, a friend and I walked around downtown Portland at Christmas. The big department stores: Meier and Frank… Fredrick and Nelson… Nordstroms… their big display windows each held a simple, pretty scene: a mannequin wearing clothes or a perfume bottle sitting in fake snow. But the windows at the J.J. Newberry’s store, damn, they were crammed with dolls and...
November 2011
2 posts
“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in...”
– Anton Chekhov (via thelibraryharlot)
NaNoWriMo started today!
Is everyone having a good time? I’ll probably be posting TROPE CHALLENGES for some of next week, because I have a feeling that both I and others are going to run out of steam fast. What I’m going to is post a random trope for the day and somehow you have to work that into your novel— via dream sequence or whatever.
I’m also going to be posting bits and pieces from the pep...
October 2011
14 posts
“I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a...”
– Vonnegut on plot « Alec Nevala-Lee (via futureisfiction)
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Neil Gaiman: 8 Good Writing Practices →
ilovereadingandwriting:
Write.
Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for ...
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Bad Politics, Worse Prose →
Probably one of my favorite Foreign Policy articles. What exactly do the worlds’ tyrants write, and what makes it so godawful? Includes almost hilarious excerpts from the works of such notable figures as Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il (weirdly intensive film studies), Stalin, Niyazov and Ayatollah Khomeini.
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How Dan Harmon Drives Himself Crazy Making...
Wired has a fascinating article about Dan Harmon’s writing on Community, which is probably one of the most hilarious shows on air today. It is heavily continuity-based and rife with allusions, commentary and pop cultural references. It is truly a joy to watch, and is so artfully put together. And no wonder— Harmon constructs not only every episode, but every scene based on an...
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Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Rules for Writing Fiction
Eight rules for writing fiction:
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
...
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Vonnegut: How to Write With Style
Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.
These revelations tell us as readers what sort of...
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Online Science Fiction Encyclopedia →
Explore authors and themes in the science fiction genre with this new beta encyclopedia.
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Still Need a Plot for Your NaNoWriMo Novel? →
Try theyfightcrime.org! It randomly generates characters based on the sentence: He’s an [adjective] [adjective] [profession] who [backstory/motivation]. She’s an [adjective] [adjective] [profession] who [backstory/motivation]. They fight crime!
So yeah, these are generally very silly. But NaNoWriMo is really about throwing your inhibitions out the window and just WRITING something....
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Writing a Dystopia or Something Apocalyptic for...
Check out a few of these photojournals of abandoned places if you’re in need for some inspiration:
Chernobyl:
Kidofspeed has a wonderful travelogue of her motorcycle trip through the dead zone of the Chernobyl area. It’s fascinating and heartbreaking to see the subtle changes as she travels closer and closer to the epicenter of the disaster— herds of horses roaming, abandoned...
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Using Real Psychology in Your Writing
thisisnotpsychology:
What Will Your Character Do When Disaster Strikes? by Carolyn Kaufman, PsyD
Characterization and Conflict: Using Psychological Tests to Improve Your Writing by Carolyn Kaufman, PsyD
Gathering Information from Characters: Types of Questions by JJ Cooper
Using Body Language in Writing by JJ Cooper
Body Language Cheat Sheet by Carolyn Kaufman, PsyD
USING ARCHETYPES IN YOUR...
September 2011
3 posts
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Welcome!
As your super friendly blog maintainer (that would be me, Sarah Z.), I would like to extend a warm hand towards all of you awesome Defenders!
If, for some reason, you have no idea exactly what you stumbled on (in that case, hello anonymous!), it’s probably a good idea that I briefly explain who we are. We may sound a bit like a cult from our url, but I promise that is mostly not the case....