Monday:
- Mystery Writing is Murder: On Signings
: According to the blogger, signings are both tiring and ineffective at selling books, and that social interactions and goodies are a way to ease the experience. Interesting.
- The Sharp Angle: Monday Movie: What I Learned From Watching ROBIN HOOD: Had anyone else read a book, and it takes them five pages to realize that the climax just passed them by? Frustrating, isn't it? Except this covers when a book doesn't have a climax that follows through. The Anti-Climax can induce rage in some readers. So this covers the showdown, when the two opposing forces clash finally and resolve the main conflict.
- The Character Thearapist: Subtext Revisited: This post doesn't have a lot of meat to it, but it does link to an interesting article on ego states. It also serves as a nice reminder that I have to put subtext into my protagonist's lines more.
- The Other Side of the Story: Guest Author Marie Lu: Wait a Second! Creating Secondary Characters: According to this post: Remember to develop your secondary characters, take advantage of their background, and possibly combine them for more interesting interactions.
- The Character Therapist: Character Clinic: Leanna Jones: Ah, a child that just wants a father. This post focuses mostly on figuring out a proper motivation for why she wants one so badly. Ideas?
- The Sharp Angle: For the (Secret) Love of Vampires: This post only proposes a question. But vampires are fascinating. I can see why they became so famous (although the trend is dying down, so to speak). Too bad that means a lot of originality had been squeezed out of it already.
edited 29th Nov '11 2:54:08 PM by chihuahua0
Apparition in the Woods
I know I'm probably the only person here right now that writes even quasi-frequently in the supernatural horror or "weird fiction" genre—as comes up surprisingly often, to the point that some people probably think me a bit of a Single-Issue Wonk—but I really like this little essay here.
edited 29th Nov '11 3:47:24 PM by JHM
I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.
Stayin' Alive
^ Well, I'm happy you posted it. I always had an appreciation for H.P., even if I don't write in his genre.
Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit Deviantart.
Wednesday:
- Adventure's in Children Publishing: WOW Wednesday: Leah Cypess on The Only Way to Write: This post brings up a lot of points. It's start out with a story about a "Person of Importance" who insists "true writers" should write 9 and 5. We all knew we all write differently, right? And that people on the Internet can be jerks at times.
Rabid Fujoshi
Anyone have anything on how to write good mystery/crime novels? I'm looking for some advice since I'm thinking about trying it out.
SPATULA, Supporters of Page Altering To Urgently Lead to Amelioration (supports not going through TRS for tweaks and minor improvements.)
Thursday:
- Superhero Nation: A Writer's Review of Priscilla the Great: Shameless plug of guest post by me. Basically, I used the internal notes I made while reading Priscilla The Great to list out a number of points of what worked, and what not. Read it.
- The Other Side of the Story: Bulking Up: Fleshing Out a Too-Short Novel: Although these days I don't have a problem with not having a long enough of a novel, this is an unexpected subject that isn't touch on often. Basically, check for clarity, anything that could be expanded on or changed, etc.
- The Sharp Angle: Love Triangles -- A Match Made In Heaven?: Here's a love triangle post that is concise and to the point. Make sure there's tensions and stake, and don't overextend it.
- The Character Therapist: My Recent Landlord Notice: Although this has little to do with writing, it's still a touching story. It manages to use the Three Little Pigs as a touching metaphor, how people are more resilient than they think.
edited 2nd Dec '11 1:57:00 PM by chihuahua0
(After I finish this post, I'll be getting to the round-up on my blog).
Friday:
- Time To Write: If you want to write better descriptions, try this: The suggestion: draw. Or at least write what you would draw. I might try it one day to see if it works.
- This Week for Writers 12/2/11: Our Favorite Articles and Blog Posts: Once again, my favorite line-up.
- Pretentious Title: How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day: 10K words? Sounds insane, right? The person who wrote this post is a full-time novelist, working 6-7 hours a day, but the things she suggest might help. Maybe I should try out that notepad trick...
Fuzzy Orange Doomsayer
^ Reading that last one . . .
Bravo!
That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful
Stayin' Alive
^^^^ I don't have much, but: Writing Excuses - Writing Mysteries
Wednesday:
- Time to Write: The Phantom Tollbooth is 50 years old! (Watch Jules Feiffer & Norton Juster reminisce): This is a good book.
- Mystery Writing is Murder: On Sharing Our Work: No, you have to wait until you can see Manifestation Files.
- Adventures in Children's Writing: WOW Wednesday: Tina Moss on Writing Like a Reader
- The Other Side of the Story: Pile On: Combing Scenes for Dramatic Punch: Does incorporating sub-plots into one scene count?
- The Sharp Angle: Adventures In Co-Writing: First Draft Suckage Takes On New Meaning: I can't wait until The Shonen Project (a collab project I'm in) comes back into session.
- Seeking the Write Life: Your Story CAN Go ANYWHERE. Really.: I dare you guys to guess the four stories describe. It's easier than expected.
edited 7th Dec '11 2:37:31 PM by chihuahua0
Fuzzy Orange Doomsayer
My first thought at the mention of "children killing each other for televised sport" is "since when is that an unusual or uncommon plotline?" Maybe I'm not reading the same stories as the rest of us . . .
edited 7th Dec '11 3:58:29 PM by feotakahari
That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful
Thursday:
- Time to Write: Why writers need productive paranoia and to listen to one expert only: Remember, you have the last say.
- The Character Therapist: Traits of Self-Destructing Characters: Hmm...motivation is key.
- The Other Side of the Story: Just Another Day: Slice of Life Stories: Even though this is a repost, it's still good advice.
edited 8th Dec '11 2:19:06 PM by chihuahua0
Kubrick's essay: on Words and Movies -
I think that for a movie or a play to say anything really truthful about life, it has to do so very obliquely, so as to avoid all pat conclusions and neatly tied-up ideas. The point of view it is conveying has to be completely entwined with a sense of life as it is, and has to be got across through a subtle injection into the audience's consciousness. Ideas which are valid and truthful are so multi-faceted that they don't yield themselves to frontal assault. The ideas have to be discovered by the audience, and their thrill in making the discovery makes those ideas all the more powerful. You use the audience's thrill of surprise and discovery to reinforce your ideas, rather than reinforce them artificially through plot points or phoney drama or phoney stage dynamics put in to power them across.
It's sometimes said that a great novel makes a less promising basis for a film than a novel which is merely good. I don't think that adapting great novels presents any special problems which are not involved in adapting good novels or mediocre novels; except that you will be more heavily criticised if the film is bad, and you may be even if it's good. I think almost any novel can be successfully adapted, provided it is not one whose aesthetic integrity is lost along with its length. For example, the kind of novel in which a great deal and variety of action is absolutely essential to the story, so that it loses much of its point when you subtract heavily from the number of events or their development. People have asked me how it is possible to make a film out of Lolita when so much of the quality of the book depends on Nabokov's prose style. But to take the prose style as any more than just a part of a great book is simply misunderstanding just what a great book is. Of course, the quality of the writing is one of the elements that make a novel great. But this quality is a result of the quality of the writer's obsession with his subject, with a theme and a concept and a view of life and an understanding of character. Style is what an artist uses to fascinate the beholder in order to convey to him his feelings and emotions and thoughts. These are what have to be dramatised, not the style. The dramatising has to find a style of its own, as it will do if it really grasps the content. And in doing this it will bring out another side of that structure which has gone into the novel. It may or may not be as good as the novel; sometimes it may in certain ways be even better.
Oddly enough, acting comes into the picture somewhere here. At its best, realistic drama consists of a progression of moods and feelings that play upon the audience's feelings and transform the author's meaning into an emotional experience. This means that the author must not think of paper and ink and words as being his writing tools, but rather that he works in flesh and feeling. And in this sense I feel that too few writers seem to understand what an actor can communicate emotionally and what he cannot. Often, at one point, the writer expects a silent look to get across what it would take a rebus puzzle to explain, and in the next moment the actor is given a long speech to convey something that is quite apparent in the situation and for which a brief look would be sufficient. Writers tend to approach the creation of drama too much in terms of words, failing to realise that the greatest force they have is the mood and feeling they can produce in the audience through the actor. They tend to see the actor grudgingly, as someone likely to ruin what they have written, rather than seeing that the actor is in every sense their medium.
You might wonder, as a result of this, whether directing was anything more or less than a continuation of the writing. I think that is precisely what directing should be. It would follow, then, that a writer-director is really the perfect dramatic instrument; and the few examples we have where these two peculiar techniques have been properly mastered by one man have, I believe, produced the most consistently fine work.
When the director is not his own author, I think it is his duty to be one hundred per cent faithful to the author's meaning and to sacrifice none of it for the sake of climax or effect. This seems a fairly obvious notion, yet how many plays and films have you seen where the experience was exciting and arresting but when it was over you felt there was less there than met the eye? And this is usually due to artificial stimulation of the senses by technique which disregards the inner design of the play. It is here that we see the cult of the director at its worst.
On the other hand, I don't want to imply rigidity. Nothing in making movies gives a greater sense of elation than participation in a process of allowing the work to grow, through vital collaboration between script, director and actors, as it goes along. Any art form properly practised involves a to and fro between conception and execution, the original intention being constantly modified as one tries to give it objective realisation. In painting a picture this goes on between the artist and his canvas; in making a movie it goes on between people.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
It's something that QQQQQ would take heed, but that's obviously not his name on the article. 
Say, that's your only post. Are you a lurker? Welcome's to Writers' Block then. If not, well...
Now:
Monday:
- Time to Write: Could your flaws be your strengths?: Lady Gaga! :D
- Lynnette Labelle: The Nightmare of Writing Dreams... : More reasons why dreams in fiction are hard to execute.
- Seeking the Write Life: Are You Getting to the Heart of Your Characters?: It's a post on emotions!
edited 12th Dec '11 4:20:45 PM by chihuahua0
Apparition in the Woods
I made a comment on the Lynnette Labelle post, in case anyone actually cares about my opinion on the matter...
I have little problem with illustrating my characters' emotions through their actions, so the last post didn't have too much relevance to me; the first post, however, basically described how I've lived my life for the past five years, which kind of made me more than a little happy.
I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.
Yay! My article dumping is working!
But I find the first article interesting too, especially the part about how some eccentrics might amphify their eccenticness for the public and such.
Apparition in the Woods
Do you mean "too" as in "relative to you" or "relative to the other articles"?
*Vagueness Alarm ringing*
I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.
Tuesday:
- The Sharp Angle: Simple Rewards: Aww...what a cute baby!
- Time to Write: 7 Keys to Writing Without Stress: Hmm...this time the poster used proper capitalization.
- Superhero Nation: How Can Superheroes Maintain a Day Job?: This can also be useful for stories which uses a Masquerade.
Wednesday:
- Lynette Labelle: How Does a Writer Plot Successfully?: Another basis post on story arc. Hmm...dogs...Cats?
- Ghostwriter Dad: How to Build a Tribe on Twitter: -checks Twitter account-
- Adventures in Children's Publishing: Angie Frazier on the Importance of Making Hope Happen: Read this story.
Observation: Wednesday has the most blog posts. Whether traffic spikes on this day or not, I need to ask.
Also, don't forget to check out every link.
edited 14th Dec '11 3:35:04 PM by chihuahua0
I changed accounts.
Question: for that quiz at Superhero Nation about manuscripts and such, when it asks for a name in the beginning, is it asking for your name or the idea's name?
I am now known as Flyboy.
Heard all about how Twilight presents bad relationship models? Have its numerous flaws been parroted at you all over the Internet? Do you feel that you already know how to avoid its mistakes?
Read this anyway.
You'll learn lots about grammar and how not to write annoying narrators.
edited 1st Jan '12 3:24:58 PM by SnowyFoxes
The last battle's curtains will open on stage!