Popular Posts
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A Writer's Moment: 'Property of the imagination' : “The English language is nobody's special property. ...
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“One of the great joys of life is creativity. Information goes in, gets shuffled about, and comes out in new and intere...
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A Writer's Moment: 'Be willing to fail' : “I'm always terrified when I'm writing.” – Mary Karr ...
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A Writer's Moment: 'Information In; Creative Responses Out' : “One of the great joys of life is creativity....
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“Librarians and romance writers accomplish one mission better than anyone, including English teachers: we create readers for life - and w...
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A Writer's Moment: 'Story ideas surround you' : “I always tell my students, 'If you walk around with your eyes and ears...
Sunday, July 31, 2022
A Writer's Moment: Keeping Them Digging
Keeping Them Digging
“In the end, does it really matter if newspapers physically disappear? Probably not: the world is always changing. But does it matter if organizations independent enough and rich enough to employ journalists to do their job disappear? Yes, that matters hugely; it affects the whole of life and society.” – Andrew Marr
Born this day in 1959, Andrew Marr is a British commentator, broadcaster and journalist who is former editor of The Independent and political editor of BBC News.
He reflects a worry shared by many of us who have started as or continue to serve as journalists – that our newer generation of readers is forgetting about the valuable role that journalists have in our society, and that funding for newspapers as we long have known them is rapidly disappearing.
“The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage,” he noted. “It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don’t have access to politicians, who don’t have easy access to official documents, who aren’t able to buttonhole people in power.” Keeping this thought in the conversation is important for everyone who writes.
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Saturday, July 30, 2022
A Writer's Moment: 'Enriching and enhancing our lives'
'Enriching and enhancing our lives'
“Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Friday, July 29, 2022
A Writer's Moment: 'Fill your mind with images'
'Fill your mind with images'
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Thursday, July 28, 2022
A Writer's Moment: 'Socially acceptable schizophrenia'
'Socially acceptable schizophrenia'
"Writing is a socially acceptable form of
schizophrenia." - E.L. Doctorow
Doctorow, whose novel Ragtime
won every major writing award and was the precursor to many other great
works to follow, once said that it is the historian's place to tell us about a
time in history or an era, and it is the novelist's role to tell us how we
would act and feel if we lived during that time.
His characters exemplified Hemingway's admonition that when writing a novel,
the writer should create living people – “... people, not characters. A
character is a caricature.”
I thought about Doctorow and his marvelous work recently while talking with a
radio interviewer about my new book Rainbow Rock. “You
really put us into the time and place,” the interviewer said. “Did
you feel an obligation to make that real to us, so that we would know?”
And I used Doctorow's words above as part of my response, saying THAT is,
indeed, the writer's obligation. It is not acceptable to be “mostly
right.” We must be completely right in what we share if we are to remain
true to our craft and to the great writers who have led us along the way.
“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader,” Doctorow
wrote. “Not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained
upon.”
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Wednesday, July 27, 2022
A Writer's Moment: Inspired by Human Interactions
Inspired by Human Interactions
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Sunday, July 24, 2022
A Writer's Moment: 'Integrity . . .doesn't blow in the wind'
'Integrity . . .doesn't blow in the wind'
500 stories to detective, mystery and adventure magazines.
McGee made his first appearance in The Deep Blue Good-bye, starting a run of 21 "McGee" bestsellers. Each title includes a color, the last being The Lonely Silver Rain. In 2016, Nathaniel Philbrick - author of In The Heart Of The Sea and Mayflower - said: "I recently discovered John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series … and it's as prescient and verbally precise as anyone writing today can possibly hope to be."
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Saturday, July 23, 2022
A Writer's Moment: 'Searching for Order'
'Searching for Order'
"For me, poetry is always a search for order.'' – Elizabeth Jennings
British poet Jennings, born in July of 1926, won many awards for her “orderly” poems, which as it often turns out were anything but. She won acclaim for her lyric style including the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award for her second book of poetry A Way of Looking, and the W.H. Smith Literary Award for her 1987 Collected Works - both enjoyable and thoughtful reads.
In A Garden
It is so spruce, a metaphor of Eden
Yet I still felt lost and wonder why?
Even the beech tree from next door which shares
Everything was too neat, and someone cares
I need not have stood long
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Friday, July 22, 2022
A Writer's Moment: 'Write Whatever You Imagine'
'Write Whatever You Imagine'
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Thursday, July 21, 2022
A Writer's Moment: 'Be Imaginative . . . And Read'
'Be Imaginative . . . And Read'
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Wednesday, July 20, 2022
A Writer's Moment: 'Make yourself available'
'Make yourself available'
He got his second Olivetti in 2009 for $11 and went right to work since he almost always has several things underway. “Even if what you're working on doesn't go anywhere,” he said, “it will help you with the next thing you're doing. Make yourself available for something to happen. Give it a shot.”
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