- Hemingway as a tot. Ain’t he cute?
- Hemingway as a tot. Ain’t he cute?
For sale: Baby shoes; never used.
- Ernest Hemingway
Legend has it that Hemingway wrote the above when his colleagues bet him he couldn’t write a story in just six words. After winning the bet, Hemingway called it his best work.
Whether that’s just an urban legend or has a basis in fact, it’s useful to analyze why Hemingway would call it his best work. In fact, I could think of three reasons.
There’s a good article posted on Wired discussing how usage of the Internet has rewired our brains. Namely, while Internet usage does lead to increased visual-spatial ability, it also leads to shallower learning. After all, just think how many times you’ve only skimmed an article on the Internet rather than read it as thoroughly as you would if it were on paper. Why, I bet you’re skimming this now!
So that’s all well and good, but how does it apply to you? Well, the article got me thinking how you could take advantage of human psychology in your writing. read more…
Why Titles Are Important
There are a lot of writing sites that actively enforce proper capitalization as well as good style rules when it comes to titles. In large part, such rules are enforced due to aesthetics. Having a forum full of properly formatted titles is a lot like having a clean, organized room. Yet, I’ve always thought it’s a bit misguided.
For one, an author may have a perfectly good reason for not following the proper style rules. The Pursuit of Happyness by Chris Gardner is one such example. There, the author based the title of the book off the name of a daycare, which misspelled ‘happyness’ in its name, that he used to leave his son at during the day.
But for another, the title is a good indicator of how an author feels about his own work. Whenever I see a literary work on the Young Writers Society with a shoddy title, I know the author does not care about the work he posted. Plus, if you can’t bother to write a proper title – something that only takes a minute – then what does that say about the likely quality of the work?
And that is why the title is so important: it’s the first indicator to the reader of how the author feels about his work and about the quality of the work. That indicator is extremely important as it lets the reader know whether or not to spend the time necessary to read and review the work in question (which is why YWS doesn’t actively enforce rules concerning titles of works). So if you’re not spending time on your title, you may want to rethink your priorities.
Not listing these in any particular order; these are just some very good desktop backgrounds that you may enjoy as a reader/writer.
To see the full-size image, simply click on it.
I’m not exactly sure when the whole grammatical convention of writing ‘he/she’ came into being when the gender was unclear, but I imagine it’s a pretty recent development. For centuries (millenia?), you always wrote ‘he’ if the gender was not known. But of course, doing that is no longer tenable.
So instead at some point, someone decided that from now on, we must write ‘he/she’ or ‘his/her’. This idiosyncratic style of writing quickly caught on and became a grammatical convention. But, it’s time to stop this.
In writing, we should strive to remove as many unnecessary words as possible (and not a word more). This is especially true in academic writing (even though a great many academics have missed the memo…), but it’s also true in creative writing. Using five words when just one word will do is nowadays regarded as absurd.
And this is seen very clearly with cases of ‘he/she’. So instead of using two words when just one will do, just go with your gender. If you’re a guy, use ‘he’. If you’re a lady, use ’she’. Or, do the opposite. It doesn’t matter which gender you go with as long as you’re consistent throughout the piece you’re writing.
But lets stop the he/she stuff. It’s unnecessary, breaks the flow of whatever you’re writing, and is becoming absurd.
We’ve all been through it: you come up with an idea that you’re really excited about and it’s subsequently all you can think about. At first, you have a ton of energy and you may spend ample time per day on your idea. But, the creative excitement wanes as you begin to encounter the drudgery of executing your idea. If it’s a novel, that could mean taking hours to put down on paper what you already know in your head. Or it could mean editing and revising your novel. If it’s a project, then it could mean having to sticking to deadlines and filling in mundane details. Either way, you’re filling in odds and ends for which the creativity aspect is either nil or non-existent. Eventually, you abandon the idea and move on to something else that you’re really excited about.
This stage in the idea development process is known as the creativity plateau. It starts off with generating an idea, being really excited about the idea, then having to do the mundane stuff. Once we enter that later plateau for which creativity isn’t always necessary, we get bored and move on to our next great idea. As a result, you may have scores of unfinished ideas. read more…
After taking a month-long hiatus from YWS, I headed for the literature forums to find something to review to make my return seem official to myself. Of the topics I opened up, I was more or less discouraged from reviewing some, mostly because the topics didn’t interest me enough to keep me reading or I had a difficult time comprehending what the writer meant.
I felt I was being too critical, so I ended up not reviewing anything. But it got me thinking: what are some of the things in posts that YWS members feel deter them from reviewing? I posed this question to chat and got some interesting answers in response:
Silented1: Long stories, lots of words, and a “Please Review”.
Most members here can tell you that if you keep your average post length at 1000 words (or less!) you’re likely to get more reviews. That’s because people generally tend to skim over a story at first glance and take it in as a whole. A large amount of words or a long page seems like a chore to read through, unless you’ve got an attention-grabbing first line that holds us hostage until the end. If not, do us a favor and keep it short by posting your stories in parts.
People will review what they want. Attaching a “Please Review” to the title, or prefacing it with such phrase will only make people not review. It’s the reverse psychology ordeal going there.
Rosey Unicorn: “Ignore all spelling and grammar mistakes”.
Seriously, if you forgot to revise, it’s best to put posting off until you do so. Or if you made spelling and grammar mistakes, it’s probably better to let them be pointed out in case you happen to skip over them in your own revisions. If a reviewer isn’t deterred by being told to ignore or spelling and grammar mistakes, such a comment usually fuels them to review your story, flames and all, with the sole target of pointing out spelling and grammar errors.
“Another thing that bugs me to no end,” Rosey says, “is when they [writers] give a summary at the beginning.”
Yes, writers. Please. It’s annoying. Imagine going into a movie theater and seeing a five-minute clip at the beginning of the movie that summarizes everything that’s about to happen. Would you sit for the next two hours?
Yeah, didn’t think so. Readers thrive on suspense, so you should try to keep as much of it alive as you can.
ScarlettFire: Long paragraphs and lack of spacing.
Bombarding your audience with a long paragraph will not do much good. Correction: Bombarding your audience with long paragraphs won’t do them any good. Part of writing is in the spacing—paragraph breaks let you know when a new speaker starts talking or a new event is about to take place. Cramming everything together into one big mosh pit is tedious for us to read through because we have to decipher where you wanted to break.
Aet Linding: [I don’t like it] When work is unreadable. If I have to take some effort to figure out how to read it, I’m not going to bother.
“If you’re bad with grammar, that’s okay,” Aet says. But, if you understand the rules of it and choose not to use it for either stylistic effect or just a lapse of laziness on your part, remind yourself that a reviewer won’t feel compelled to dedicate as much time to your piece. Punctuation, grammar, line breaks and syntax were all created for a reason.
DON’T preface your work with explanations.
No one cares if the idea is morbid and you usually don’t think about morbid things. If the idea is good, then we’ll want to read it, but saying that you generally don’t do this or don’t do that makes us feel like we can’t praise an aspect as much as we’d like to. And for the record, no one cares if you wrote it in five minutes, either. We just hope you ran a spell check.
In a story, words are what show emotion. Not emoticons.
When the main character dies, I’d really like to see in vivid description that her mother becomes so distraught that her emotion could reach out and affect how I feel about the character’s death. I really don’t want to see a yellow ball with a sideways left parentheses sign streaming blue tears from its eyes.
In favor or opposition of any of these? Leave a comment telling why, and don’t forget to include your biggest deterrent from reviewing a literary work.
Charles Stross, the critically acclaimed science-fiction author of such books as Singularity Sky (great series) and Halting State, announced today in his blog that he will no longer be writing science-fiction.
We’ve been taking a hard look at the market realities; things have been particularly grim in SF/F publishing ever since November 2008, and it has become clear that in light of a downward spiral of diminishing sales things can’t go on as before. The poor market conditions (Tim Holman of Little, Brown says the British publishing industry as a whole shipped 1% fewer books in 2009) are resulting in downward pressure on new book advances: as an agent of my acquaintance put it, with respect to advances, “five grand is the new twenty grand”.
Obviously, science-fiction publishing isn’t what it used to be. Thirty years ago, if you put a rocket on the cover, then you were guaranteed an audience of tens of thousands as geeks rushed to buy it. These days, science-fiction’s biggest competitor isn’t other books or even movies: it’s video games. That leads to some unfortunate market realities. So as they say, adapt or die. It looks like Stross has chosen the former:
Late last year my agent and I conducted an exhaustive review of my skill-set and background, to the extent of commissioning a focus group to look into my work to date and suggest new directions.
Stross then goes on to describe his new novel:
It’s vs. Its: Why?
I think this is something we all know even though a lot of us inadvertently slip up from time to time. You use “it’s” only to denote “it is”. That’s it. Unlike almost every single other word in the English language, you do not add an apostrophe to “its” to denote possession.
Yet, where did this odd exception come from? Why do you not add an apostrophe to “its” to show possession? It really doesn’t make sense whatsoever, which is why so many people mess it up. I spent a little bit of time trying to figure out the reason why, but came up with nothing.
My own personal theory is that since the word ‘it’ is gender neutral and almost always an object, something referred to as ‘it’ cannot philosophically possess anything. Thus, saying something like “It’s leaf,” is a logical fallacy since while the leaf is on the tree, the tree does not own the leaf.
Any other theories out there, or does someone know the reason why ‘its’ has no apostrophe when used to denote possession?
Every now and then, I’ll see someone write something like: “In Washington D.C., I saw…”. Yet, that sentence is grammatically incorrect. Whenever you refer to Washington, D.C., you need the comma in between the Washington and the D.C. It’s just like saying “San Francisco, CA” or “London, UK”. But, you may say, isn’t the full name of the nation’s capitol “Washington D.C.”? Not really.
Back in the day, Washington, D.C. originally comprised land given up by the States of Maryland and Virginia. Within it, the district was split into five distinct entities: Washington County, Alexandria County, the City of Alexandria (Alexandria, D.C.), the City of Georgetown (Georgetown, D.C.), and the City of Washington (Washington, D.C.). The last one is where you have all the important federal buildings, such as the Capitol, the White House, and the Supreme Court.
Over time, though, things changed. Virginia took back its land in 1846, leaving just the County of Washington, Georgetown, and Washington City. At this time, the County of Washington was still very much rural, and some of the richer Congressman even owned country estates there. But then the Civil War came along, and that expanded the role of the federal government. New bureaucracies sprung up, and those institutions expanded outside of the City of Washington and into the County of Washington. You also had more commerce before than in the past due to the large concentration of Union troops defending the city.
As the nature of the district changed, so too did the boundaries and in 1871, the federal government decided to extend the City of Washington to encompass the entire district. So even though Washington and D.C. are really one in the same today, you still write it as Washington, D.C.
