"I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."
— David Foster Wallace (via ideclaire)
— Mark Twain (via fourgreytowers)
October 24th
9:45 PM
9:45 PM
Creative writing revelation
It’s downright weird how you can drastically improve a story just by chopping it up and changing the order of a few scenes. Seriously.
"
Let her be bored. Let her have long afternoons with absolutely nothing to do. Limit her TV-watching time and her internet-playing time and take away her cell phone. Give her a whole summer of lazy mornings and dreamy afternoons. Make sure she has a library card and a comfy corner where she can curl up with a book.
Give her a notebook and five bucks so she can pick out a great pen. Insist she spend time with the family. It’s even better if this time is spent in another state, a cabin in the woods, a cottage on the lake, far from her friends and people her own age. Give her some tedious chores to do. Make her mow the lawn, do the dishes by hand, paint the garage. Make her go on long walks with you and tell her you just want to listen to the sounds of the neighborhood.
Let her be lonely. Let her believe that no one in the world truly understands her. Give her the freedom to fall in love with the wrong person, to lose her heart, to have it smashed and abused and broken. Occasionally be too busy to listen, be distracted by other things, have your nose in a great book, be gone with your own friends. Let her have secrets
"
"There is always a sheet of paper. There is always a pen. There is always a way out."
— H.L. Mencken (via nevver)
“Men like women who write. Even though they don’t say so. A writer is a foreign country.”
-Marguerite Duras
July 13th
3:10 PM
3:10 PM
Re: semicolons
Ya know, it’s true that people speak in semicolons, so that’s a valid point (I’m looking atchu, Heather).
I just don’t like them in writing, except to separate items in a complex list (http://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/semicolons_in_lists.htm) or as the creeper wink in an emoticon.
I think the reason I hate them so much is that I used to overuse them, before I realized that sentences just pack more punch when they’re separated instead of semi’d. The way I write can very often be polemical (what can I say? I like rhetoric), so I have no use for the wishy-washy feel a semicolon creates.
Exhibit A:
“I fucking hate semicolons; they’re the worst punctuation mark in existence.”
“I fucking hate semicolons. They’re the worst punctuation mark in existence.”
