Category Archives: Articles

Matthew Cheney has some great advice for aspiring writers: “If Only I’d Known: Writing Advice to My Younger Self”

My lack as a young writer was not so much a lack of skill as a lack of knowledge of myself and the world. I thought if I could just write nice sentences, I’d win a Pulitzer by the time I was 20.

I desperately wanted to major in playwrighting as an undergraduate because I thought the workshops would teach me the skills to get my plays on Broadway. I was annoyed to find many of my peers at NYU writing pale imitations of Pulp Fiction (the hot movie among aspiring screenwriters at the time), but it took me a little while to realize I was writing pale imitations of Christopher Durang and Samuel Beckett. We all imitated because we hadn’t figured out how to tap our own experiences and interests, and our interests and experiences weren’t yet broad enough to produce work of much depth. A little bit of this had to do with our age and various levels of talent, but much more of it had to do with our inability yet to tap into the deep currents of our lives. Chris Shinn, who was a couple years ahead of me at NYU, was smarter than the rest of us and figured this out early, writing Four while we were still trying to figure out what we wanted to say. But it isn’t a matter of age so much as of personality — we all discover our subject matter at different times, and bloom at different rates. [...]

Actually, I might have been happier if I had been able to give myself permission to study something in college other than writing. But I was convinced the only way to become a good writer was to major in it. Not so. For many people, in fact, the best way to be a good writer is to spend some time doing things other than studying writing. My writing benefited more from my time working in a high school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side than it did from the classes I was taking when not at work.

There’s lots more in the article; read it here. Via Jay Lake.

BBC News has an article featuring a study that (unsurprisingly) shows that therapeutic writing can help patients deal with the stress of cancer.

Her “expressive writing” exercise, lasting just 20 minutes, posed questions to leukaemia or lymphoma patients about how the cancer had changed them and how they felt about those changes.

When those taking part were contacted again a few weeks later, 49% said that the writing had changed their thoughts about their illness, while 38% said their feelings towards their situation had changed.

While there was no evidence of direct impact of the session on their illness, where the patients had reported greater changes in their mindset during the writing, this could be linked to more positive reports of quality of life given to their doctors during follow-up appointments.

Ms Morgan said: “Thoughts and feelings, or the cognitive processing and emotions related to cancer, are key writing elements associated with health benefits, according to previous studies. Writing only about the facts has shown no benefit.”

Link

People have been direly predicting the death of the novel for decades. Dave Edelman has an interesting and well-considered new take on the subject.

Will the novel die? I won’t keep you in suspense: Yes, the novel will die. It might not happen in your lifetime. But yes, I can say unequivocally that the novel will eventually breathe its last and lay down contentedly in the grave of dead art forms. I’ll be very conservative and estimate 50 years.

And you know what? It’s not that big a deal.

Very soon we’re going to have a medium for distributing the written word that’s not only easier but better suited to the task than books. So let’s dispense with the silly, sentimental arguments you often hear about why storytelling is never going to go electronic. “You can’t replace the feeling of a holding a book,” “I don’t like reading on a screen,” and “I can’t read an e-book in the bathtub” are some of the sillier excuses you hear all the time for why printed books are going to survive until the end of time. I’m sorry, but “I can hold my entire library in my hand,” “I can download new books at will,” “I can search my entire library in a nanosecond,” “I can instantly send books to my friends,” “I can translate and define words on the fly,” and “I don’t have to devote an entire room of my house to holding my books” are going to trump reading in the bathtub any day of the week.

To sum up: the written word is going electronic. Permanently. Soon. Once that happens, storytellers will have no need to shoehorn their stories into these 8? x 12? hunks of pulped wood and ink. And once we’re not restricted to the medium of the novel, we’ll be leaving the form behind.

The death of the novel doesn’t mean the death of storytelling. It doesn’t mean that nobody’s ever going to put an Aristotelian structure of fiction into 120,000 words. On the contrary, it’s going to mean that storytelling will finally be unleashed. We’re going to see fiction strap on blue tights and a red cape and really soar.

Personally I think that’s going to be fun to see.

Link (via Futurismic)