theatlantic:

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a Sadist. No 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.

7. 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.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell 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.

Via Brainpickings/Reddit [Photo: AP]

revolutionizeed:

Don’t start out writing novels. They take too long. Begin your writing life instead by cranking out “a hell of a lot of short stories,” as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; he claims that it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row. He waited until the age of 30 to write his first novel, Fahrenheit 451. “Worth waiting for, huh?”

Some really great advice to students that want to write and love to write!

alanedit:

What people think editors do.

parisgram:

Super Bowl of Chili. (Taken with instagram)

(Source: zaglyadenie)

nprmusic:

“And as always in parting, we wish you peace, love and soul.”

R.I.P. Don Cornelius.

vintageanchor:

A Top 10 List of Writing Tips from Famous Writers…

10. Work according to the program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time! (Henry Miller)

9. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (George Orwell)

8. Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page. (Margaret Atwood)

7. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.” (Elmore Leonard)

6. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing. (Henry Miller)

5. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it. (Neil Gaiman)

4. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils. (Margaret Atwood)

3. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. (George Orwell)

2. Don’t overuse exclamation points!! (William Safire)

1. Leave out the parts readers tend to skip. (Elmore Leonard)

Read the article in by Jim Higgins in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

directingfilm:

The Most Influential Filmmaker You’ve Never Heard Of: 

I still refer to Lenny Lipton’s 1972 book Independent Filmmaking as a resource for low-cost celluloid (not digital) production.  A recent interview by Don Diego Ramirez showed me that Lenny has done more in his life than just write a few books on 8mm and 16mm production.  I was amazed by the breadth of his work.  Creativity that truly knows no bounds. Some highlights:

• He pioneered early documentary filmmaking - with films such as Revelation of the Foundation.
• He pioneered 3D cinema.  Note the photo above.  The man is holding two Super 8 cameras: this is, in essence, how 3D films are shot today.  Lenny even wrote an article in that magazine about shooting 3D Super 8 films in the 1970s.
• Authored the seminal book Foundations of the Stereoscopic Cinema (1982).  
• His 3D work was used by NASA in the Mars Rover.
• James Cameron acknowledged Lenny’s work in the making of Avatar.
• He wrote Puff, the Magic Dragon with Peter Yarrow, later made popular by Yarrow’s group Peter, Paul and Mary.
• He also kept company with Tim Leary and Ken Kesey, novelist of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and lived with Salvador Dali.

Don’t just be a filmmaker.  Be an artist.  Read more about this fascinating filmmaker here.

~ü

coolchicksfromhistory:

Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, 1961.

Joan, a 19 year old Freedom Rider, was sentenced to two months in prison for her involvement in the integration of a Jackson, Mississippi bound train.  She served more than the required two months because each addition day reduced her $200 fine by $3.

In the Fall of 1961, Joan transferred from Duke University to historically black Tougaloo Southern Christian College because she felt integration should be a two way street. 

Today Joan is a retired teaching assistant living in Virginia and mother to five sons.  After the 2008 election she brought her Obama pin to the grave of Medgar Evers.  

journalismworkshops:

quatermain:

OS X Programmers/Companies: Read This

So, yesterday Apple launched the new iBooks Author application for the Mac. It looks great, produces fantastic dynamic content, and more than one person assumed that it was outputting ePub3 files. However, that was not the case, as is extensively documented by Daniel Glazman (co-chairman of the WC3 CSS working group) on his blog:

A wysiwyg EPUB3 editor will not be able to edit correctly an IBA document because of the different mimetype and the proprietary CSS extensions. iBooks Author is not able to reopen a iBook it exported in their pseudo-EPUB3 format because there is no Import mechanism! That means that on one hand EPUB3 readers cannot reuse a document created by iBooks Author because of its HTML/CSS/Namespaces extensions, and on the other iBooks Author cannot create an iBook from an existing EPUB3 document because it cannot import it.

In actuality, it even goes a little further than this.

Read More

I’ve been using iBooks Author for the last couple of days, and I am loving it. It seems like a great way to produce interactive books for the iPad, but leaves out all of the other e-readers. I’d love to see what comes of his idea to create an easy to use application for making standard interactive EPUB3 files.