Tag: writers

What Writers Think About

ideas

One of the cool things about calling yourself a writer is you get to do all kinds of things that everybody else calls bone-ass lazy.  Stuff like spending hours drinking coffee, taking long strolls through the Internet and staring off into space.  Wordy Wordsworth called it, “… powerful feelings: … recollected in tranquility” or something like that.  This “work” is essential for writers to hone their craft.  The serious upside is you get to discover all kinds of interesting facts, and you have time to come up with even more interesting conclusions.  Here are just a few things I’ve been pondering for the last couple of months.

There’s a town in Canada called Smithers — which means the people who live there are Smithereens.

On average, the Dutch are the tallest people in the world — even though a lot of them are standing below sea level.

Apparently, a huge bunch of people born between 1977 and 1983 are sick and tired of being lumped in with those terminally malcontent millennials.  They have decided to perform a generational Brexit (Genexit?) and want to be referred to as Xennials.  I can’t say I blame them.

In the future, people will look at their electronic devices and think “What a stupid icon for a telephone.”

Despite everybody and her friend claiming they broke the Internet – you can’t.  The truth is the Internet is no longer vulnerable to human attack: there are just too many servers scattered across the planet.  However, before you go all SkyNet/Terminator, 99.99% of all electronic devices are just dumb machines used for storage.

Humans first walked on the moon 50 years ago in 1969.  That was 2 years before women got to vote nationally in Switzerland and 8 years before France quit using the guillotine for executions.  Weird, huh?

One of the earliest and most persistent symptoms of lead poisoning is irritability, so it’s interesting that statistics show violent crime (aside from armed robbery) has been steadily decreasing since lead was banned from automobile fuel in the late 1980s.  Coincidence?  Maybe. . .

For several years, universities have been adding puppies to their “safe spaces” to combat student stress and exam anxiety.  Whatever!  The weird thing is nobody is willing to talk about what happens to the puppies when they’re no longer puppies.  Creepy!

Over 100 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute.  Wow!  And, according to the last time they kept records (several years ago) it would take you approximately 93,000 years to watch everything YouTube has to offer.  That is a lot of avoidance behaviour!

In the last 10 years, restaurant revenues, movie theatre revenues and department stores revenues have all declined — whereas the revenues of home delivery companies like Uber Eats, GrubHub, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon have all dramatically increased.  If this trend continues, eventually millennials will never have a reason to leave their apartments.  And this is a bad thing?

Andy Warhol was wrong.  In the future, everybody will have 15 minutes of privacy.

And finally:

I think it’s absolutely hilarious that a generation raised on South Park and Family Guy spend so much time being eagerly offended by everything.  Irony is not dead.

Bad Advice To Writers

writing

Everyone knows how to write.  We learn it in school.  However, to be a writer takes a singular commitment that nobody can teach you.  Unfortunately, there are tons of people out there who think they can — and they’re spreading a lot of misinformation around.  These literary hacks aren’t lies, as such; they’re just bad advice.  Here are a few of the most notorious ones.

Write for yourself.  This is just a crock!  No writer writes for themselves.  If they did, they wouldn’t WRITE IT DOWN!  The minute you commit words to paper, you are trying to communicate – full stop.

Take risks.  Here’s a newsflash.  You’re sitting in front of a computer, not dashing into a burning building.  The only risk you’re taking is that people won’t read your stuff, and once you get through that emotional firewall, the rest is easy.  Pouring your soul onto the page is what you’re supposed to do.  It isn’t a risk; it’s a necessity.

Write about what you know.  This is stupid advice.  Folks, it’s called fiction, and fiction, by definition, is a pack of lies.  Writers are liars.  That’s their job.  Billy Shakespeare didn’t know anything about Danish princes, but he wrote Hamlet … because, guess what? … he made it up.  Writers create their own universe; good writers make it believable.  If you’re going to limit yourself to your own experience, stick to those rambling End-Of-December emails that chronicle your family’s yearly adventures.

Paint a picture.  This is one of those sounds-profound bits of advice that doesn’t mean a thing.  Quite frankly, if you want to paint a picture, ya might wanna get a brush and some paint.  Apparently, that’s worth 1,000 words.  Here’s the deal. Your audience has seen a tree.  They all know what it looks like.  Describing it in great detail is not going to enhance their experience.  What you want to do is write the mood.  For example:

The tree was dancing green in the brilliant afternoon sun.
The tree was moldy green against the grey evening sky.

This is the same tree, but with six words you’ve changed the time of day, the season, probably the temperature and, most importantly, the mood.  The reader paints the tree themselves.  That’s the beauty of words on a page: the details (the real details) of any tale are already in the reader’s mind.  The writer’s mission is to jumpstart that imagination so each reader can see their own tree.

And finally:

Join a writer’s group.  This is actually good advice, but remember the more time you spend talking about writing, the less time you have to actually write.  And the only way to become a writer is to write.  Everything else is just playing at it.

Winter News

news

Late winter news is never as weird as late summer news, but sometimes the combination of too many coats and too much cold just aligns the stars properly and strange things peek out.  Here are a couple of items I found that might tweak your brain on an otherwise ordinary day.

I don’t ever wish bad luck on anybody (That stuff has a tendency to come back and bite ya!) but this week’s Oprah Winfrey news just screams “just desserts” — with extra sprinkles.  The news is Ms. Winfrey has lost somewhere in the neighbourhood of 40 million dollars from her investment in Weight Watchers.  We all know that for someone of Winfrey’s financial girth, 40 million is chump change, but still there’s a certain poetic justice here.  The thing is Oprah Winfrey made her money (at last count $3.5 billion) from telling women there’s something wrong with them – and then mercilessly selling them the cure.  (Don’t believe me?  Take a look at the headlines on any O Magazine.) Therefore, it seems only fair that she should lose some of her ill-gotten gains while trying to suck even more cash out of the self-help industry.  Karma’s a bitch, huh?

Meanwhile, according to France Vingt-Quatre (the Gallic equivalent of the BBC) Le Beverley, a quiet little movie theatre on a quiet little street in Paris, has closed.  It seems the 90-seat cinema simply wasn’t pulling the customers in anymore and the owner, Maurice Laroche, 74, decided it was time to retire.  And this is news because …?  Le Beverley was the last porno theatre in Paris.  Actually, “erotic” movies have always been a respected part of French cinema.  Back in the day (I’m talkin’ late 70s) many of them (Emmanuelle, Immoral Tales, Tendres Cousines) even made their way into the mainstream.  Unfortunately, these days, when every movie except Toy Story has a complimentary nude scene, most people don’t understand that erotic is a whisper, not a shout, and they just call it all “porn” and get on.  Anyway, Le Beverley, like most movie theatres that aren’t Multiplexes, has disappeared into the 21st century where Netflix is king and Pornhub gets 80 to 90 million views a day.  (That’s right! A day!)  Personally, I’m not much for porn, but, considering Parisians invented the modern porn industry by selling racy postcards to uptight Englishmen, I think it’s only fitting that their last erotic theatre should get a few international headlines.

And finally:

A guy from the Isle of Wight has written a book — with his nose.  Apparently, Josh Barry (who has Cerebral Palsy) just got tired of dictating his thoughts and decided “The hell with it: I’ll do it myself” and for the last nine years has been typing away – one letter at a time – and now his book is finished.  Normally, I’m not interested in inspirational tales at all, but this story has such a cool “Archy and Mehitabel” vibe that I’m going to go with it.  Honestly, I can’t imagine this kind of perseverance, but, the next time I’m moanin’ about a 500 word Friday blog, I’m going to try my best to take a page out of Josh’s book, cowboy-up and just get on with it.