Tag: writing
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Top Couples in Fiction, Breaking the Rules of Novel-Writing, Killing Off the Printed Book – All Discussed Here at Stories and Stuff in 2012!
It’s not quite the new year yet, but let’s get this up before all of the Christmas business take over: Top 5 Literary Couples Here’s a secret – any time you put ‘top five’ or ‘top ten’ in your title you increase the likelihood that people will find and read it. I don’t use this trick…
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Slow Blogging, And Why You Should Blog Less
This post was planned to be an announcement of Stories and Stuff going down to one post a week for the next month or two, to give my blogging muscles a rest and to focus on fiction writing a bit more. Well, think of my surprise when I came across this slow blogging manifesto. Author…
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Why Do Writers Write?
“Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.” – Thomas Berger, apparently There never are enough good books out there. Good books exists, but once they’re read it’s hard to find another one – so I do write to fill the gap in books I love to read. On reflection, this is maybe one of…
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Be Still and Write
“Many of the aspiring writers I know talk about writing more than they actually write. Instead of setting free the novel or short story or essay that is sizzling at the ends of their fingers, desperate to set fire to the world, they fret about writer’s block or about never having the time to write.”…
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Who Says I’m Qualified to Contribute to Academic Conversation?
So I am in middle of writing a twenty-page paper about Woodstock, which means my writing muscle is pretty occupied right now. (Though seriously, the organizational disaster that was Woodstock is an incredibly interesting topic, and it’s worth reading and laughing about sometime. 400,000 hippies hanging out in the mud, with almost no food and…
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The Crime of Re-Using Plots – Is It A Crime?
Oh no, it’s another mad dash to the airport, where the girl swears she will leave the country forever and the guy insists he’s in love with her, you sigh to yourself. Everyone knows romantic comedies all have the same plot. Why do they even bother making more of them? Well, how many plots do…
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The Debate: Literary vs. Genre Fiction, and Is There a Chasm Between the Two?
When I began submitting stories to fiction magazines, I was amazed to find there was a large gulf between “genre” fiction and “literary” fiction, and that literary fiction was usually considered to be the superior kind. As a person who enjoys reading all types of books, I’d always thought a good story was a good…
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Share the Love (of Writing)
Today I am talking to a Grade 9 class about writing. I have a friend who is a teacher, and he asked me to come in talk about what exactly you can do with your writing other than hand it in for marks in English class. And I think that is a really good idea,…
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Are Writers Original? A Quote
The original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate. – François-René de Chateaubriand, Le génie du Christianisme (1802) People like to rag on Shakespeare for re-using the plots of other people for almost every play he wrote. They also like to claim J.K. Rowling stole all her good ideas from Tolkien (I…
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Writing Vs. Editing – and Oscar Wilde’s Commas
“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” – Oscar Wilde** Editing can take forever. I can slave over one passage for hours, knowing it doesn’t say what I really want it to say yet, but without…
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