These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.
- Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
- Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the end as possible.
- Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
- Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
- Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Rules of Writing Fiction
- Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.
- Eliminate every superfluous word, as “Funeral services will be at 2 o’clock Tuesday,” not “The funeral services will be held at the hour of 2 o’clock on Tuesday.” “He said” is better than “He said in the course of conversation.”
- Avoid the use of adjectives, especially such extravagant ones as “splendid,” “gorgeous,” “grand,” “magnificent,” etc.
- Be careful of the word “also.” It usually modifies the word it follows closest. “He, also, went” means “He, too, went.” “He went also” means he went in addition to taking some other action.
- Be careful of the word “only.” “He only had $10″ means he alone was the possessor of such wealth; “He had only $10″ means the ten was all the cash he possessed.
- A long quotation without introducing the speaker makes a poor lead especially and is bad at any time. Break into the quotation as soon as you can, thus: “‘I should prefer,’ the speaker said, ‘to let the reader know who I am as soon as possible.’”
Rules borrowed from the Kansas City Star.
“Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,” Hemingway told a reporter in 1940. “I’ve never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides with them.”
“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
You don’t often see the Camry wagons. Makes a pretty cool ride though. Haul some surfboards with it.
(Source: michaellapena)
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
“A sense of obligation.”
Stephen Crane
While editing The Sun Also Rises, Maxwell Perkins had to decide how to handle the many obscenities in Hemingway’s text. He planned a lunch with the author and kept a list of words to discuss with him.
While Perkins was at lunch, Charles Scribner came looking for him and, finding his office empty, consulted his calendar. It read “shit piss fuck bitch.”
When Perkins returned, Scribner said, “You must be exhausted.”
(Source: futilitycloset.com)
We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make sense of it.
But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.
Kat Walsh, Wikimedia Foundation board member, on Wikipedia’s SOPA blackout.
Lancia Aurelia Coupe B20/B24 (1950—1958)
Despite the gorgeous looks of the Aurelia models, these were historically important for something else — the engine.
The world’s first production V6 engine was developed and fitted into the Aurelias, in order to solve stability issues Lancia was having with its previous V4 engines.
But looking at the B24 convertible, the last thing I care about is the engine… my word, it is gorgeous.
