ALEX NOBLE - WRITING JOURNAL-2015

The New Diary - Tristine Rainer

 

 

The New Diary is about a completely modern concept of journal writing. It has little to do with the rigid daily calendar diary you may have kept as a child or the factual travelogue you wrote to recall the Grand Canyon. Instead, it is a tool for tapping the full power of your inner resources.

The New Diary is as much for those who already keep a journal as it is for those who have never kept one. It does not tell you the "right" way to keep a diary; rather, it offers numerous possibilities for using the diary to achieve your own purposes. It is a place for you to clarify goals, visualize the future, and focus your engergies; a means of freeing your intuition and imagination; a workbook for exploring your dreams, your past, and your present life.

It is for everyone seeking concrete methods for dealing with personal problems. It is for women and men interested in achieving self-reliance and inner liberation, for artists and writers seeking new techniques for overcoming blocks to creativity.

 

How to Write a Memoir - William Zinsser

 

 

Be yourself, speak freely, and think small

By William Zinsser

 

One of the saddest sentences I know is “I wish I had asked my mother about that.” Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are. Only when they have children of their own—and feel the first twinges of their own advancing age—do they suddenly want to know more about their family heritage and all its accretions of anecdote and lore. “What exactly were those stories my dad used to tell about coming to America?” “Where exactly was that farm in the Midwest where my mother grew up?”

Writers are the custodians of memory, and that’s what you must become if you want to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into. That record can take many shapes. It can be a formal memoir—a careful act of literary construction. Or it can be an informal family history, written to tell your children and your grandchildren about the family they were born into. It can be the oral history that you extract by tape recorder from a parent or a grandparent too old or too sick to do any writing. Or it can be anything else you want it to be: some hybrid mixture of history and reminiscence. Whatever it is, it’s an important kind of writing. Too often memories die with their owner, and too often time surprises us by running out.

 

Ira Glass on Storytelling

 

 

Paolo Coelho on Internet Freedom & Links to Free Books

Excerpt: When you’ve eaten an orange, you have to go back to the shop to buy another. In that case, it makes sense to pay on the spot. With an object of art, you’re not buying paper, ink, paintbrush, canvas or musical notes, but the idea born out of a combination of those products. ‘Pirating’ can act as an introduction to an artist’s work. If you like his or her idea, then you will want to have it in your house; a good idea doesn’t need protection. The rest is either greed or ignorance."

"My Thoughts On S.O.P.A."
by Paulo Coelho

"In the former Soviet Union, in the late 1950s and 60s, many books that questioned the political system began to be circulated privately in mimeographed form. Their authors never earned a penny in royalties. On the contrary, they were persecuted, denounced in the official press, and sent into exile in the notorious Siberian gulags. Yet they continued to write. Why? Because they needed to share what they were feeling. From the Gospels to political manifestos, literature has allowed ideas to travel and even to change the world.

I have nothing against people earning money from their books; that’s how I make my living. But look at what’s happening now. Stop Online Piracy Act (S.O.P.A) may disrupt internet. This is a REAL DANGER, not only for Americans, but for all of us, as the law – if approved – will affect the whole planet. And how do I feel about this? As an author, I should be defending ‘intellectual property’, but I’m not. Pirates of the world, unite and pirate everything I’ve ever written!

Advice to New Writers from Po Bronson

 

Full Biography and other information about Po's books and articles at:

http://www.pobronson.com

 

Excerpt:

Find a few good role models. You only need a few, maybe only one. Let them inspire you. Art reacts to art. All good books are a work of art that is a creative reaction to other art.

Always tell a story. It grounds the reader in a shared experience.

Understand voice. Write the same sentence ten different ways by imitating the writing voices of ten different writers. 

Practice plots. Understand different ways to tell the same story – the difference between hiding a surprise and foreshadowing it, for instance. Starting a story in the middle versus its natural beginning, et cetera. Learn what creates suspense, forward lean, keeps the pages turning.

Journalism first or fiction first? (Grad school in Journalism or Grad school in Creative Writing?) There is no way to answer this. This is an artificial question. It reveals a thirst, a hope, that the journey can be shortened, that there is a shortcut. It can’t. Journalism (facts) or fiction (style)? Both. Both. Both. In no particular order.

Don’t be a snob. It’s good for people to read, so whatever they read, no matter what it is, be glad they're reading.  

No matter what your style or genre or form, even if it's journalism, read John Gardner's "The Art of Fiction" very carefully and try some of the exercises. Realize that once you command these skills, you can break every rule he teaches, but these are the basic skills.

Work on your weaknesses. Find out what you’re hiding from.

Stop looking for shortcuts.

Hemingway's Top 5 Tips for Writing Well

 

 

Many business people faced with the task of writing for marketing purposes are quick to say:

Hey, I’m no Hemingway!

But really, who better than Hemingway to emulate? Rather than embracing the flowery prose of the literati, he chose to eschew obfuscation at every turn and write simply and clearly.

So let’s see what Ernest can teach us about effective writing.

1. Use short sentences.

Hemingway was famous for a terse minimalist style of writing that dispensed with flowery adjectives and got straight to the point. In short, Hemingway wrote with simple genius.

Perhaps his finest demonstration of short sentence prowess was when he was challenged to tell an entire story in only 6 words:

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

 

Writers on Writing: From Annie Lamott's Bird by Bird (Essential Reading!)

 

 

“Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won’t do any of those things; you’ll never get in that way.”

“E.L. Doctorow once said that “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, life, I have ever heard.