Interesting stuff
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Interesting stuff
Maybe someone else has read something interesting and can provide a link.
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1. Find a Subject You Care About
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your hose or a love letter to the girl next door will do.
2. Do Not Ramble,
Though I won’t ramble on about that.
3. Keep It Simple
As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. ‘To be or not to be?’ asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story ‘Eveline’ is just this one: ‘She was tired.’ At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.
Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and earth.’
4. Have the Guts to Cut
It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.
etc.
-- Updated January 14th, 2013, 4:04 pm to add the following --
___________________________________________________________________________________ More on writing, from George Orwell. I try to reread this every six months or so, just so I don't go slack.
http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html
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Re: Interesting stuff
Recently in heavy traffic, someone angrily refered to me as a "nickle-plated crotch".Fleetfootphil wrote:I find lots of interesting stuff.
I thought that was a pretty interesting term.
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Re: Interesting stuff
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Re: Interesting stuff
I greatly admired Vonnegut. I loved Bradbury and Fidley. All but one of my literary heroes are dead. What I learned from them summarized:
1. Enlarge your vocabulary: if there is a more specific word for what you mean, use that, rather than the general, broad one, e.g. sprint, dash or gallop, rather than run.
2. Get rid of as many 'ing's as possible.
3. Edit. Leave fallow for two weeks. Edit again.
- Knightoffaith
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Re: Interesting stuff
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- Favorite Philosopher: Terry Pratchett
Re: Interesting stuff
2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023