An Extra Pair of Eyes


"

21 Lies Writers Tell Themselves

1. Underwear is definitely pants.
2. All you need to be a writer is talent.
3. My talent and its demands protect me from the responsibilities of normal people.
4. I’m almost done.
5. When I’m not engaged in the process of writing, I’m thinking about writing, therefore I am writing.
6. My writer’s block protects me from humiliating myself.
7. I don’t care that my frenemy from grad school got a million dollars for that literary crossover novel.
8. I don’t care that I got a million dollars for my literary crossover novel. I’m going to just keep it real. This doesn’t change anything for me. You know.
9. I don’t need to back up my computer.
10. Publishing this book will change my life.
11. I’m not going to get caught up in all that publicity stuff.
12. I’m only on social media because I have to be to promote X.
13. I’m only going to go on Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr for a few more minutes.
14. I need a MFA.
15. I don’t need a MFA (and no one else does either).
16. If you put something on the Internet, no one will read it.
17. If you put something on the Internet, everyone will read it.
18. Writing for free for that website will help me get my name out there.
19. I don’t need a contract for this.
20. I don’t need an agent for this.
21. My agent is ignoring me!

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posted 6 months ago via aimmyarrowshigh · © with 336 notes

"Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I’m beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it’s actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning."
— Arundhati Roy (via victoriousvocabulary)

Gee, I don’t know how to research writing Characters of Color tastefully:

missturdle:

1.) It’s not hard to figure out what to do, there are plenty of resources.

People say you have to get it right, do your research, but … what else are you supposed to research? It’s not like people with more pigment in their skin have completely different personalities than those with less, any more than any individual. It’s frustrating when I can’t even figure out what the heck people are talking about.

Bam. Research step one done for you.


2.) Writing characters of color/minorities is a good thing.

I don’t like the notion that fantasy authors are under some kind of obligation to present ethnically diverse worlds. I’m English, and a fair sized part of English history consists of unwashed beardy white people in mead halls. If I’m inspired by my own history and cultural heritage, then that’s what I’m damn well going to write about. I’m not writing about some other culture just to appease the people who think there aren’t enough black characters in fantasy, or whatever. You want it, you write it. Nothing to do with me.

You’re wrong.


3.) Your all White Fantasy Land Didn’t Exist in Real Life:

…the rather medieval one has more diversity than real medieval Germany probably had […] In a world with medieval means of transport, it just doesn’t seem natural to me to mix dark-skinned people with blue-eyed blondes in one setting. I just try to give the people a colour that fits the place where they live.

You mean like the people from Africa and the Middle east who began to take over Southern Spain, as well as the Jews who were pretty well spread out throughout Europe, the Middle Easterners they would have met on the Crusades, and the incoming Mongol Hordes who spread to the very edges of Eastern Europe before the empire finally collapsed? Don’t forget that Turkey is right there, and the silk road would have gone from Song Dynasty China, through India, and ended in Turkey before moving further westwards into places like Germany. Also the attempts at the Franco-Mongol alliance would have been pretty interesting. (That’s about the 13th century - arguably smack dab in Middle Ages Europe and definite contact between France/Christian Europe and the Mongolian Empire.)

Unless you’re writing everything in the far reaches of Denmark or something, historically speaking, I call bullshit on people who have societies that are only all white ever, because it’s just inaccurate. Consider the relative closeness of Northern Africa to Spain, or Turkey to the rest of Europe, the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Crusades, Slavery existing in Europe, including England, the slave trade, imperialism, Pax Mongolica, The Silk Road, Jewish Diaspora, the Islamic Empire vs The Holy Roman Empire, Egypt, Algeria, China’s sailing across the world, The Maruyan/Gupta Empires of India, tea trades, Columbus sailing in hopes of finding China, etc, etc, etc.


4.) I mean I just don’t believe you anymore. It’s unrealistic. Seriously guys.

You’d think I’d just denied the holocaust or something. Get a grip. All I said was that I’m going to write about my own cultural experience and anyone who thinks I should do otherwise for the sake of political correctness can bugger off.

This isn’t even about being PC this is just not being wrong about everything.

good lord.


To All Writers of Everything Ever

latenightspooky:

I need to rant about this:

Also known as the best writing program ever! It’s a full-screen writing program!

So you open it up, and it looks like this:

You’re thinking, “Ok, so what? It’s a screen with a picture. Whoopdie do.” But it get’s better! It’s customizable!

See that “appearance”? Click it.

You can also use custom fonts that you have installed!

See that “music”? Click it.

If you drag your own music into the folder, like so:

You get this!:

But wait! It gets better!

See “typing sounds”? You can change those too!

Perhaps the best is - YOU CAN USE ANY PICTURE FOR THE BACKGROUND. It will automatically fade it for you!

Seriously, guys, this tool is wonderful. You can use it for:

  • Research papers
  • Novel writing
  • Play writing
  • Short stories
  • Homework assignments
  • Ranting about your friends when they piss you off
  • Writing your shopping list

It auto-saves. It exports to .rtf. Hotkeys from Word for italicize, underlining, and bold work. You can print RIGHT FROM THERE.

And the seriously best thing ever?

It fits on a flash drive. The entire thing with added music is maybe 131MBs.

The bestest thing ever.

It’s free.


ronstormer:

  • Sylvia Plath: There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.
  • Rudyard Kipling: I’m sorry Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.
  • Emily Dickinson: [Your poems] are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties and are generally devoid of true poetical qualities.
  • Ernest Hemingway (on The Torrents of Spring): It would be extremely rotten taste, to say nothing of being horribly cruel, should we want to publish it.
  • Dr. Seuss: Too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.
  • The Diary of Anne Frank: The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.
  • Richard Bach (on Jonathan Livingston Seagull): will never make it as a paperback. (Over 7.25 million copies sold)
  • H.G. Wells (on The War of the Worlds): An endless nightmare. I do not believe it would “take”…I think the verdict would be ‘Oh don’t read that horrid book’. And (on The Time Machine): It is not interesting enough for the general reader and not thorough enough for the scientific reader.
  • Edgar Allan Poe: Readers in this country have a decided and strong preference for works in which a single and connected story occupies the entire volume.
  • Herman Melville (on Moby Dick): We regret to say that our united opinion is entirely against the book as we do not think it would be at all suitable for the Juvenile Market in [England]. It is very long, rather old-fashioned…
  • Jack London: [Your book is] forbidding and depressing.
  • William Faulkner: If the book had a plot and structure, we might suggest shortening and revisions, but it is so diffuse that I don’t think this would be of any use. My chief objection is that you don’t have any story to tell. And two years later: Good God, I can’t publish this!
  • Stephen King (on Carrie): We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.
  • Joseph Heller (on Catch–22): I haven’t really the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say… Apparently the author intends it to be funny – possibly even satire – but it is really not funny on any intellectual level … From your long publishing experience you will know that it is less disastrous to turn down a work of genius than to turn down talented mediocrities.
  • George Orwell (on Animal Farm): It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.
  • Oscar Wilde (on Lady Windermere’s Fan): My dear sir, I have read your manuscript. Oh, my dear sir.
  • Vladimir Nabokov (on Lolita): … overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian … the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream … I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.
  • The Tale of Peter Rabbit was turned down so many times, Beatrix Potter initially self-published it.
  • Lust for Life by Irving Stone was rejected 16 times, but found a publisher and went on to sell about 25 million copies.
  • John Grisham’s first novel was rejected 25 times.
  • Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen (Chicken Soup for the Soul) received 134 rejections.
  • Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) received 121 rejections.
  • Gertrude Stein spent 22 years submitting before getting a single poem accepted.
  • Judy Blume, beloved by children everywhere, received rejections for two straight years.
  • A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle received 26 rejections.
  • Frank Herbert’s Dune was rejected 20 times.
  • Carrie by Stephen King received 30 rejections.
  • The Diary of Anne Frank received 16 rejections.
  • Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rolling was rejected 12 times.
  • Dr. Seuss received 27 rejection letters

"Write hard and clear about what hurts."
— Ernest Hemingway  (via blua)

"I find for myself in writing, there are times where it’s very difficult not to be precious with words–to remember to convince yourself: “Just put it on paper.” So much of writing is rewriting, and you can really hold yourself back before even putting your work out there."
— Jon Stewart (via vpilot)
posted 8 months ago via vpilot with 17 notes

"Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft. You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right - and breaking your train of thought and the writer’s trance in the bargain - or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don’t have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it … but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don’t do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off."
— Stephen King  (via alexisawkward)

"…The hardest but straightest-arrow advice for all writers is: write your way through it. Write your way through writer’s block, through plot problems, through everything. Write every day. Write unceasingly, without fear, without the need for certainty."
— Chuck Wendig (via lhayescomics)