This list of tips for writers comes from an unlikely place.... the NEA blog on reading, which I was browsing trying to find the origin of that list I just posted.
1. Join a writers group, if only for the deadline. Always, for anything you write, have a deadline. When you meet one deadline, make another. When you blow one, definitely make another, and by all means forget you ever made the first one. Guilt is not your friend.
2. Be funny. Whether you’re writing comedy or not, be funny. If you can’t be funny, be amazing, because writing well without at least occasionally being funny is almost impossible. Try to make a reader laugh, or at least smile, with the way you pace and phrase a line. If you can’t use language to provoke one of the commonest, most pleasurable experiences around — laughter — how in the world are you going to do the harder but not necessarily better thing, and make a reader cry?
3. Enlarge your vocabulary. I’m serious. Your vocabulary is your tacklebox. If you go fishing with only a couple of lures, you’ll catch the same kind of fish over and over. Bring an overstuffed tacklebox, and there’s no lunker you can’t land. Use your vocabulary judiciously, of course, because not everybody has as big a one as you do. But don’t be afraid, every once in a while, to use a word your reader might not know. How else are they going to learn? How else did you?
4. Keep it sensual. By this I don’t mean write dirty, I mean engage all of a reader’s senses, especially but not exclusively the visual. Whether with a description or a metaphor, create pictures in your audience’s head. If you want to write about abstractions, be a philosopher, and reach even fewer readers than you already do.
5. Make stuff up. There’s been a vogue lately for writing that feeds on pre-existing material: novels about a famous love affair, novels about a notorious calamity, novels about great writers, etc. This kind of novel can work, but something original is almost always better than something derivative — more surprising, more fun, more suspenseful. In fiction, as on Wall Street, derivatives are an easy payday, but they don’t create wealth; they only redistribute it. The trouble with making up a new story is, alas, that it’s harder. Does Antioch teach a full-length course in plotting? I wonder, because it’s the least teachable skill a writer needs. If only it were the least important.
A related point here: the difference between telling the truth and making stuff up is getting slippery lately. When in doubt, trust what works. If the true stuff reads better, you’re probably writing nonfiction, so take out most of the made-up stuff. If the made-up stuff reads better, you’re writing fiction, so take out most of the true stuff. If you can’t decide which stuff reads better, write poetry. There at least, the true and the made-up belong together.
6. Keep rewriting the ending till it’s perfect; then wait a week and write it again. Writing an ending is the great lost art in American fiction. With the possible exception of your first graf, your last graf is the most important. If you can’t decide between two endings, they probably both need work.
7. Go for broke. Odds are you’ll be broke anyway, so you may as well go for it.
8 . Write every day. I’ve never tried this myself, but I hear it works.
I'm copying from Atlantis....
Some of these books were amazing experiences for me... mostly from when I was growing up, and they were my entire world. This reads like a list of old favorites :-) Atlantis says that the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books The Big Read has printed below. Here are the instructions for the game.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own weblog / journal so we can try and track down
these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them.
OK, so I'm not one of them. And I skipped out on bolding anything, just underlined all of them! But I am a huge advocate for some of these marvelous books! (Life of Pi, Mockingbird, Gatsby, Grapes of Wrath, Anna Karenina, Crime and P.) Also, it's amazing to see how many of these books have been written in the last 10 years. How inspirational for contemporary writers :-)
- Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
- Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
- Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
- Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
- To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
- The Bible
- Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
- Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
- His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman
- Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
- Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
- Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
- Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
- Complete Works of William Shakespeare
- Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
- The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
- Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
- Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
- The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
- Middlemarch - George Eliot
- Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
- The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
- Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
- War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
- The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
- Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
- Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
- Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
- The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
- Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
- David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
- Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
- Emma - Jane Austen
- Persuasion - Jane Austen
- The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
- The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
- Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
- Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
- Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
- Animal Farm - George Orwell
- The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
- One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
- The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
- Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
- Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
- The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Attwood
- Lord of the Flies - William Golding
- Atonement - Ian McEwan
- Life of Pi - Yann Martel
- Dune - Frank Herbert
- Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
- Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
- A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
- The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
- Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
- Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
- Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
- The Secret History - Donna Tartt
- The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
- Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
- On The Road - Jack Kerouac
- Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
- Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
- Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
- Moby Dick - Herman Melville
- Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
- Dracula - Bram Stoker
- The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Notes From a Small Island - Bill Bryson
- Ulysses - James Joyce
- The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
- Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ranson
- Germinal - Emile Zola
- Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
- Possession - AS Byatt
- A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
- Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
- The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
- The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishigury
- Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
- A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
- Charlotte's Web - EB White
- The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
- Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
- The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
- The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
- Watership Down - Richard Adams
- A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
- A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
- The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
- Hamlet - William Shakespeare
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
- Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Read: 62/100
I definitely want to read the Jane Austen's I have never gotten through (Emma, Persuasion), especially because I recently watched the BBC television versions, and was enchanted. The books themselves start out so much less compellingly than P&P, so I've always dropped off. I've started and never finished Catch-22 (too much in a madman's mind and too bizarre) and Lolita (too much in a madman's mind and too ordinary).
And if there is anything else out of these which anyone particularly loved, please do tell me and I will add it to my list.
I’ve been hinting around it for the past week or so, but I realized, dear Vox neighbors, family and friends, that I have never actually updated you on some recent life changes. The job with the startup I have been talking with was finalized last week, and I signed on! Part of the deal is that I have agreed to be in Boston full-time for the next six months, where the company is headquartered and all the developers are located.
This is an extremely wraught and bittersweet moment for me. Sweet, mostly, but also tinged with sadness at the requirement that I leave my friends and home in NYC. It is unclear whether this needs to be a permanent move for me, because potentially after the first six months, I can be in NYC and commute a few days a week to Boston. I need to be in NYC at least a day or two a week to meet with clients. (In fact, they considered allowing me to start out with this arrangement earlier, but I felt I would make a bigger impact by being in headquarters for longer.)
I have lived in NYC for seven years, minus two months. What a momentous era it has been! I think seven years just about officially makes me a New Yorker. (But I still root for Boston teams.) I love NYC’s passion, diversity, creativity, and energy, and I’m sure that I always will… from the hot sweaty bustle of Chinatown to the quiet richness of the Met… more places and restaurants and memories than I can possible count.
Even more than these things: after a long slow start making friends, right now, six of my closest friends live in the city. So in leaving NYC behind, I am also moving away from them. I am a private person with a small circle of people I am close to… and with a rich shared history together. I have known these six friends from anywhere from eighteen to (the newest) nine years of laughter, adventure, and dream-sharing. Even though Boston is where I grew up, I am so sad (and a little scared) of losing my support and joy system.
However, while I can say that NYC has been where I really grew up, it hasn’t always been lucky. Starting right at the very beginning. I moved to NYC a few days before 9/11 – it happened on my second day of work at a brand new job. What a dark time followed that, for me and every other New Yorker (most much less new than me)! It was a trial by fire introduction to a city, whose spirit has never dimmed. But despite my enthusiasms, I stumbled there more than flew, it often seemed.
So, I am trusting that this move is a good thing. I am so very excited about the job opportunity, the fantastic people I will be working with, and the chance to make a real difference in this company. And maybe it’s just time to circulate a little bit – and if I come back to NYC again (besides every other weekend to visit my peeps!) it will be on my own terms and with renewed spirit and much more joy in my heart. Who knows where the road from here will lead? Not even pretending it's me. :-)
To new beginnings....
#21 was a psychology book about fear.
#22 was this book by Alice Sebold. I loved her novel The Lovely Bones, and don't have anything specific to say about this one. Instead I'm going to quote some bits from a review that I liked from the Guardian.
"Horror on earth is real and it is everyday." It never leaves you but, as Susie's father realises, "You live in the face of it." She got older, relaxed, let her guard down, told her story, found happiness in simple connections rather than defensiveness and booze. Her memoir Lucky ends, "I live in the world where the two truths co-exist, where both hell and hope live in the palm of my hand." She gets up at 3am to work because she likes writing in the dark, but she lives in the California sunshine. When she signs people's books, Alice Sebold writes "Viva!"
Also, I love that her husband, fellow writer Glen David Gold, inscribed this about Alice S in one of his latest books:
"Mind-reader, levitator, secret weapon, gadfly, butterfly. Artist's model, box jumper, diva, high-wire aerialist. Quick-change artiste, sensation of the ages, and inquirer into the spirit world. Critic, effects-builder, manager, diva, oracle, mistress of escapes, queen of the mysteries, fellow conjurer, class act, and have I said 'diva' already? Friend, sister, secret weapon, paramour. Wife! I love you - let's take over this evil planet and make it a playground."
I am about to go work at a startup, and have no idea yet how crazy my hours will be. So I want to pay special attention to staying healthy, eating and exercising. Here is a great list of the 11 best foods you may not be eating, but should be.
- Beets: Think of beets as red spinach, Dr. Bowden said, because they are a rich source of folate as well as natural red pigments that may be cancer fighters.How to eat: Fresh, raw and grated to make a salad. Heating decreases the antioxidant power.
- Cabbage: Loaded with nutrients like sulforaphane, a chemical said to boost cancer-fighting enzymes.
How to eat: Asian-style slaw or as a crunchy topping on burgers and sandwiches. - Swiss chard: A leafy green vegetable packed with carotenoids that protect aging eyes.
How to eat it: Chop and saute in olive oil. - Cinnamon: May help control blood sugar and cholesterol.
How to eat it: Sprinkle on coffee or oatmeal. - Pomegranate juice: Appears to lower blood pressure and loaded with antioxidants.
How to eat: Just drink it. - Dried plums: Okay, so they are really prunes, but they are packed with antioxidants.
How to eat: Wrapped in prosciutto and baked. - Pumpkin seeds: The most nutritious part of the
pumpkin and packed with magnesium; high levels of the mineral are
associated with lower risk for early death.
How to eat: Roasted as a snack, or sprinkled on salad. - Sardines: Dr. Bowden calls them “health food in a
can.'’ They are high in omega-3’s, contain virtually no mercury and are
loaded with calcium. They also contain iron, magnesium, phosphorus,
potassium, zinc, copper and manganese as well as a full complement of B
vitamins.
How to eat: Choose sardines packed in olive or sardine oil. Eat plain, mixed with salad, on toast, or mashed with dijon mustard and onions as a spread. - Turmeric: The “superstar of spices,'’ it may have anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties.
How to eat: Mix with scrambled eggs or in any vegetable dish. - Frozen blueberries: Even though freezing can
degrade some of the nutrients in fruits and vegetables, frozen
blueberries are available year-round and don’t spoil; associated with
better memory in animal studies.
How to eat: Blended with yogurt or chocolate soy milk and sprinkled with crushed almonds. - Canned pumpkin: A low-calorie vegetable that is high in fiber and immune-stimulating vitamin A; fills you up on very few calories.
How to eat: Mix with a little butter, cinnamon and nutmeg.
Inspired by myself, I decided to post some more ancient faves. This may date me a little, but this was my first favorite song.
And this is probably the first song I learned all the words to. (Or at least my interpretation of the Spanish words.)
I was convinced this was the most romantic song ever. It still might be. Catch the hunger in her eyes in both videos. *That* is what is missing these days in all her recent stuff...
I am babysitting the contractors fixing the bathroom ceiling.
Why is Madonna in the news so much these days? First befriending Britney as a music video prop. Then flying across the pond to flirt with A-Rod. Here's something which isn't much news...
Memoir says Madonna's true love is herself (AP)
AP - A memoir by Madonna's brother says the singer really does love her husband, director Guy Ritchie, but, apparently, not as much as she loves her career and herself.
(Ghabby sent that to me.) Here's to the good old days. Madge, always with the power to shock, entertain, and delight us.
loathing...
- waiting, waiting, the interminable waiting
- having my bathroom ceiling undergo major repairs
- trying to do practical things
- being a nervous wreck
- separations and goodbyes
loving....
- reconciliations
- goodbye parties (more and more and more!)
- goodbye letters
- highly scripted movies, where I already know the ending
- a funny email I got from my ex-boyfriend
- asking for help and getting it, in moving, in writing letters, in closing with the past
- accepting a new job... woohoo... finally signed the offer letter and sent it back
- this cute ruffled dress G convinced me to buy
looking forward to....
- finally leaving
- starting my new job next week
- feeling safe again
- my "new" car
Also, loving more pink martini (and just learning who Rita Hayworth was). Here's another song, in honor of them both.
Before you get worried, listen to the song.
I love Pink Martini. The group as well as occasionally the drink ;-)

sure, thanks for visiting joy! :-) read more
on the NEA's advice on how to be a writer