Sunday, May 22, 2016

Writing Style

Avoid phrases like "I heard" and "I saw". It separates the reader from the sensations.

Example:I could hear the creak of the door.

(Better to write) The door creaked as it opened.

Punctuation rule

If action is used as a dialogue tag, the dialogue should end in a period, and the action should be capitalized.
Example:
“This is silly." He dropped his hand.
“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” — Graham Greene

Saturday, May 21, 2016


A baby is born with a need to love and never outgrows it-Frank A. Clark

Thursday, May 19, 2016


Besides writing The Canterbury Tales,Geoffrey Chaucer worked as a civil servant, a diplomat, a courtier, and a scrap metal collector.

Saturday, May 14, 2016

I'm reading "The Nest" by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney.  I didn't start getting into it until I plopped the cursor to the middle of the book and started describing a scene where a volunteer stole a sculpture from ground zero in order to commemorate a memory from his deceased wife who died on 9/11.
“In writing,use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.” — Kurt Vonnegut

Friday, May 13, 2016

Thursday, May 12, 2016

Earnest Hemingway and Phillip Roth often wrote while standing.

Sunday, May 8, 2016

In accordance with his wishes, Hunter S.Thompson's ashes were fired from a cannon.

Friday, May 6, 2016

I really like this snarky review of a book


Remembrance: A Mediator Novel Paperback – February 2, 2016
by Meg Cabot  (Author)So, Paul Slater is back, again, and trying to force Suze to sleep with him. I was sooo tired of this storyline. So what does Suze do about it this time? Get a restraining order? NOPE. Only normal people think with the brains they've been gifted with. Does she tell her fiancé that Paul is trying to blackmail her? NOPE. She just lies some more, which has truly become her modus operandi. Paul has decided that he wants to relieve Suze of her virginity. So, why wouldn't she just move her wedding up, then that little issue could have been dealt with easily enough... But, oh no, we can't have that because Jesse wants to drag the sexual frustration out for years on end. The whole story just kind of peeved me off. This kind of stuff doesn't happen in every day life because we call the cops when needed, tell our fiancé(s) the truth, and we don't buckle under to ridiculous blackmail and then drug people later to try to get out of it. What a silly mess this book was. I get that it's fiction, but Suze turned into an absolute idiot as an adult. I could forgive some of her stupidity as a teen, but unfortunately, the adult version of Suze hasn't gotten any better.
AMAZON!!! Why did I pay $12.53 for this on 2/1/16, just to have the price drop to $10.99 a few days later? Maybe I won't preorder things anymore, if I'm going to get ripped on the price.

review by By DvusLeoGirl
Stephen King got the inspiration for his novel Pet Sematary when his daughter's pet cat was hit by a truck.

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

“Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.” —Franklin P. Adams
“Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.” —Franklin P. Adams

Sunday, May 1, 2016

A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before.-Italo Calvino
 A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.-Italo Calvino
"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
1.What am I trying to say?
2.What words will express it?
3.What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4.Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
Could I put it more shortly?
Have I said anything that is avoidable ugly?
-George Orwell


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