Writing
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If you’re a YouTube star with a robust fan base, you just got one step closer to publishing a book. This NYTimes article from yesterday is all about a new imprint called Keywords Press — a joint venture between Simon & Schuster’s Atria Publishing Group and the Hollywood United Talent Agency — that wants to…
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I know Ira Glass’s (This American Life) interview on storytelling and the creative process has been circulated plenty already, but this little bit of kinetic typography from filmmaker David Shiyang Liu–detailing the part about the gap between your taste and your creative output–is kind of amazing, and worth sharing. (Link to the actual interview here.)…
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At the risk of turning this blog into little more than the place where I post stuff so I can reference them later, here is an interesting blog post from Leverage co-showrunner John Rogers on writing for TV shows and the spectrum series fall along between “shows about emotions” and “shows about systems.” On the subject…
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I love this bit of dialogue from Boardwalk Empire (episode: “Broadway Limited“) for its brevity and how Nucky controls the scene. (This post is more for me than you. You’re welcome.) NUCKY How is he still alive after three days out in the cold? ELI He’s fat. NUCKY What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?…
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Maybe I only have a finite resource of words, and here I am scraping the bottom, pressing the pad of my thumb against whatever will stick.
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So, I wrote a really terrible YA horror novel when I was around 12 or 13. [Okay, confession: I was 12 AND 13, ’cause it took me a year to write it.] The whole thing was the result of consuming too many R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike novels, though I have no regrets. Ten years…
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[Cross-posted on OnWriters.wordpress.com.] This is post is going to sound like one long excuse, but I’m abandoning my NaNoWriMo novel. Remember when I said I wanted to write something so I could enter it in the Terry Pratchett first novel contest? Well, I spent months trying to come up with a workable idea that fulfilled…
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[Cross-posted on OnWriters.wordpress.com.] For the third time, I’m participating in NaNoWriMo. The first time I did it, in high school, I didn’t finish. The second time, while I was doing my undergrad at York University, I was so swamped with schoolwork that it took me almost the entire month to write 10,000 words and then I…
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Apparently the key to good, imaginative writing is to relax and have fun. That’s one of many conclusions drawn by YA novelist Carol Plum-Ucci in an essay she wrote for a Smart Pop Books anthology about Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle series. The essay’s called “Q: How Does a Fifteen-Year-Old Do This?” (which you can purchase for…
Zalina Alvi 