Every week I share ideas and inspirations, both silly and serious, which inform my (writing) life.
Two Riffs on the Writer’s Speaking Voice
This one, via the New Yorker, contains links to several audio recordings including one to Flannery O’Connor reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and this one, by Ze Frank is a lot less reverent. He gets to it around the 1.38 minute point. “It’s just a goddamn poem, leave the poor thing alone.”
How to Finish What You Start
“Noone’s going to buy a half-written novel. No-one’s going to read a blog post that stops short after two paragraphs. So whether your writing aspirations involve hitting the New York Times bestseller list or living from the passive income from your ebooks, you need to finish what you start.” [via Write to Done]
A $50,000 Sentence
A one-sentence letter from J.D. Salinger is up for sale. [via Salon]
Every week I share ideas and inspirations, both silly and serious, which inform my (writing) life.
Rejection
” I urge my students to go for it and send out their work, that they have to get used to a life of disappointment if they want to be writers. As if one can get used to such a thing.” — Eden Lupucki [via the Millions]
In September, Erin Morgenstern will publish her debut novel, The Night Circus–a project that endured 30 rejections from literary agents. “In 2005, she crashed out a manuscript during National Novel Writing Month, a kind of literary endurance race for writers who goad one another into completing a 50,000-word novel in four weeks. About halfway through, her project stalled. …Very little from that early draft survived, but she had an idea that excited her. She worked in bursts over the next several years …” [via Wall Street Journal]
Failure
“Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure. But the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. … Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself to be anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena where I believe I truly belonged. … Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all.” — J.K. Rowling
“I am not suggesting that it’s better – either romantic or grand – to be depressed, self-destructive, mentally unwell. But I think it’s possible to overrate both stability and happiness, to knee-jerk too far, to over-pasteurize one’s life, to buy into a pact without even knowing it… There is no great art without the messy, the fluid, the chaotic; the risky and the raw.” [via The Millions]
(Also love the part of the essay where Sonya Chung compares Facebook to the Flanders household from The Simpsons. Hahaha!)
The Story Behind Times New Roman
Times New Roman is the most widely used typeface in the world. [via The Daily]
If you’re, like me, annoyed that evil Microsoft made pretender Cambria the default font in Word, here’s how to change it back to TNR.
Open a new document.
Go to the Format menu and select Font.
Change the font to Times New Roman.
Click the “Default” button at the bottom.
The Daily Show on the Closing of Borders
(Typical Daily Show humor, so don’t watch if you are offended by the risqué.)
MAD about Words
is the brainchild (and heartchild) of
Mary Ann de Stefano
