30 Indispensable Writing Tips from Famous Authors by Jack Shepherd on Buzzfeed
(Source: prompts-and-pointers, via neil-gaiman)
This had made my day!!
Mine too.
Oh man is there higher praise for a book you’re already eagerly anticipating from one of your favorite authors than the praise of the writer of one of the best books you’ve read in the past few years?
Thursday, June 27/LOS ANGELES, CA Live Talks Los Angeles w/ Barnes & Noble @ Alex Theatre 8:00 PM 216 North Brand Boulevard Glendale, CA 91203 Tickets: www.livetalksla.org/events/upcoming-events Twitter: @livetalksla Facebook: www.facebook.com/livetalks
Neil Gaiman/OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE/Full Ticket Info Events
June 27th, at the Alex Theater in Glendale. I just got my ticket.
YOU SHOULD TOO. :)
It’s worth pointing out that the price of the ticket INCLUDES the new novel, “The Ocean At The End Of The Lane.”
"You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are."
—
From page 123 of John Green’s fantastically wrenching novel “The Fault In Our Stars”.
I’m laughing and crying on almost every page of this book. Truly and completely all the feels.
Full disclosure: I did not like Life of Pi the book.
I liked the vast majority of it, but, the beginning, and then especially the end, are major disappointments. Particularly the last third where, it seems, the wool is placed over your eyes and never removed.
So going into the movie, I knew that I was being tricked, that a con, a fantastical con, but a con nonetheless, was being thrust upon me.
And man. This might be one of those rare instances where the movie is better than the book. Because I knew going in that I was going to be disappointed, which means I could enjoy it more.
Not that Life of Pi is the worlds best movie; it’s not. But everything about the book is heightened: the imagery, the fantastic, the wonder, and, of course, the shoving of Faith (with the capital F) down your throat.
Which is fine.
The movie is about Faith, and one man (boy) finding it in the most drastic of ways. To find faith but to lose literally everything else in your life… If that’s the cost, man. Maybe it’s better to be lost.
Which, is perhaps, the point.
But, the movie: The middle of Life of Pi is beautiful. Everything with Pi on the boat, in the ocean, adrift and hopeless with nothing but a feral tiger as a companion… It’s striking, amazing, cinematic stuff.
All neatly undone with the final few minutes.
I know people who love the book because of the twist, not in spite of it. I don’t get it; I don’t like the trick pulled on the reader. I understand it. It works. I just don’t like it.
It’s a tragic tale. It’s a beautiful story covering a tragic tale.
I don’t think anyone is going to see this movie in the theater. But it’s got it’s moments. Ang Lee clearly loves the process and language of cinema; you can almost hear him gleefully adding wipes and fades between scenes. The tiger is AMAZING. The ocean is fantastic. And Gerard Depardieu is even in it for like a minute and a half.
But Life of Pi still suffers under the weight of the truth at the heart of its dream.
The Mystery of “Nancy Drew” and the Author that Never Was
The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift were all the product of one man, Edward Stratemeyer, a New Jersey author who wrote more than 1,300 books and eventually founded a syndicate of ghostwriters who pounded out juvenile mysteries based on his instructions. Thus book syndication was born. They were referred to as “book factories” and were extremely profitable.
Stratemeyer conceived the syndicate when his Rover Boys series proved so popular that he could not keep up with the demand for more books. He corralled a stable of hungry young writers, and in 1910 they were producing 10 new series annually. Each writer earned $50 to $250 for a manuscript he could produce in a month, working with characters and plot devised by Stratemeyer. He would review each completed manuscript for consistency and publish it under a pseudonym that he owned — Franklin W. Dixon, Carolyn Keene, Laura Lee Hope, Victor Appleton. Each book in a series mentioned the thrilling earlier volumes and foreshadowed the next book. The formula worked so well that when Stratemeyer died in 1930 his daughter continued the business; when she died in 1982 the syndicate was selling more than 2 million books a year.
This sounds cynical, but it worked because Stratemeyer had a sympathetic understanding of what young readers wanted. “The trouble is that very few adults get next to the heart of a boy when choosing something for him to read,” Stratemeyer wrote to a publisher in 1901. “A wide awake lad has no patience with that which is namby-pamby, or with that which he puts down as a ‘study book’ in disguise. He demands real flesh and blood heroes who do something.”
Writing books. I am obviously doing it wrong.
Learning that Franklin W. Dixon wasn’t real was more mindblowing to me as a child than learning the truth about Santa Claus.
(I choose to believe the veracity of both, actually.)
"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen — I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in the box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."
—
So I reread Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, or rather, read the Tenth Anniversary Edition, which is the “Authors Preferred Text” with something like 12,000 more words and other things. I read the original book in 2001, sometime, I think, and it immediately became one of my favorite books of all time, and when I bought the 10th Anniversary Edition last year, I planned to re-read it immediately then, but, like 98% of the books I buy it went onto a stack of books I planned to read immediately when I bought them, a stack that grows and moves and never shrinks, no matter how many books I read, for I’m always buying books and always reading books but never reading enough and always buying too many.
In any event, there’s a profound joy rereading something you love. You always take away something new (that was always there) while remembering why you loved it to begin with. It’s like a second first kiss, the first kiss after the first kiss, the one where you aren’t thinking about the neuroses involved with kissing someone and you’re nervous if you’re going to like it or they’re going to like it or if there are implications involved or if you should even kiss them again.
I reread Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself To Live every once in awhile, sometimes just the same chapters over and over, but usually the whole thing, and there’s a lot of similarities between Killing Yourself to Live and American Gods, now that I think about it.
Both are essentially road trips across America, and both deal with the fascination that comes with immortality post death, and the figures we worship in America, and the relationships we seek and the relationships we make and relationships we end and the relationships we never find.
For American Gods, it’s the Gods and gods that societies brought with them to America over the last thousand years, gods that have been forgotten and gods that have been created and gods that have floundered and gods that have prospered. Gods seeking to remain gods through any means necessary; gods who kill themselves to live.
And in Killing Yourself to Live, Chuck examines the rock and roll stars who gained immortality only after they died, in plane crashes and overdoses, through drownings and motorcycle accidents, via murder and suicide; Americans who lived like gods and whom died and whom we continue to worship.
Also, both deal with a central protagonist who is tortured by the women in his life, is saved by the women in his life, is betrayed and is forgotten and is troubled by the women he surrounds himself with. Shadow in American Gods has his wife, has Bast, has Sam Black Crow, has the goddesses who give him the moon and who steal his heart, who bring him back to life and whom kill him. Chuck has the girl he loves and the other girl he loves and the girl he used to love, he has his editor and he has his muse, and he has the pop goddesses whom he listens to as he drives.
One of those books is a true story and the other one is just true.
But, anyways, rereading American Gods, rereading anything you love, is one of the greatest joys there is. You already know you’re going to like it, but then you’re always astonished how much you love it.
Escapism is a wonderful thing, books are the gateways to the impossible, and great ones are both rare and all too common.
It’s always good to live in someone elses head, to dream someone elses dreams, if only for a few hundred pages every now and then.
A reverence for books.
Ways I am like Stitch #47.
(Source: beckett-kendrick-zane, via bluepunchbuggy)
It’s always interesting to watch the movie adaptation of a book. Especially when you have no preconceived notions going into the book, and thus, the world is yours to create entirely in your head.
For example, by the time the Harry Potter movies came out, the first four books had already been released. And the movies were faithful to the look and feel of the books (painfully so for the first two films, and then Alfonso Cuaron came in and just rejuvenated the films with Azkaban), and I don’t know anybody who feels differently.
I read Hunger Games fairly recently, but I haven’t been following all the hype, so I had no idea, really, who was cast or who was playing what or what anything would look like. I just didn’t care. I knew Jennifer Lawrence, but otherwise, nothing. And knowing that didn’t effect my imagining of the book as I read.
In fact, except for the actual Hunger Games portion, nothing in the movie was how I imagined it. This isn’t bad; in fact, some of it was quite refreshing. I imagined a more dystopian, “Days of Future Past” future, so the “dustbowl/depression” look of the districts was very interesting.
The casting for Haymitch, Effie, and Caesar (Woody Harrelson, Emily Banks and Stanley Tucci, respectively) were inspired, brilliant casting. In fact, those three were the highlights of the movie.
Not to take away from the kids… But Banks and Tucci turned such, frankly, one-note, one-dimensional stereotypes into full-blown caricatures that just chewed the scenery. And Woody Harrelson… Like I said, inspired casting.
For all the changes made to the movie, they are completely understandable, even if I wanted a more pure “Hunger Games” (the books are entirely Katniss’ point of view, so the games are all what she sees. The movie uses Tucci and the brilliant Toby Jones as ‘sports anchors’ commenting on everything we, the audience, wouldn’t know, except, we would, cause we read the books.) (I thought this touch, and showing the games being edited and designed by the “war room” and games-masters, was brilliant. A great way to make the movie interesting. That said… I still would love a Hunger Games all told from Katniss’s confused point of view.)
(A less polished Hunger Games movie, all around, would be nice.)
(In fact, a movie opening with her being raised up in the tube, and just thrown into the games, would be BRILLIANT. And then as she fights her way through, we get flashbacks and story. That would be killer.)
BUT… all of that said…. I liked it.
Sure, the romance at the heart of the story is even more contrived than the book (poor Gale and your 3 minutes of screen time; poor Peeta and your…weakness and implausibility), and, like the book, for something called “The Hunger Games” they only subsist of the smallest portion of the movie…. But I liked it.
And at least the movie had some sort of better ending than the abrupt end of the book.
But, hey, the soundtrack rocks, and the movie is a lot of fun, and, like I said, watching the adults ham it up is worth the $17.50 AMC IMAX pricetag (although, IS IT? IS IT REALLY? SEVENTEEN FIFTY FOR A MOVIE? I smell an uprising…)
Oh, and quickly… You might want to go see this only for the trailers attached. Avengers, Amazing Spider-Man, Prometheus, Snow White and the Huntsman… this summer is going to be so much fun you guys.
"If you can still see how you could have once loved a person, you are still in love; an extinct love is always wholly incredible."
— Michael Chabon, A Model World
"Take up a cause. Fall in love. Write a book."
—
-as said by John Carter to Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Also: hashtag fact. Also also: hashtag my motto for life.
“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”
― David Foster Wallace
Admittedly, I’ve never read David Foster Wallace, except for a short excerpt or essay or two here or there. I’ve never tackled Infinite Jest like so many have, over an “Infinite Summer”. I should rectify that this year.
That said, I love this quote.
And also, David Foster Wallace would have been 50 today.
This was one of the best books that I’ve read over the past few years. Not just the story itself, or the characters, or the writing, but the way the story was told, and how it was told, was just fucking brilliant.
I loved it as I was reading it.
So I was pretty pumped and wary of the movie. I think it stumbles a bit, but it improves on the book in slight ways while also not coming anywhere close to the scope or emotional depth of the book. It’s also, at times, a very claustrophobic movie, and man, was that great.
It was better than I expected. And I wept. A lot.
