Story Starter
If yesterday’s “severed hand found in nude dancer’s home” wasn’t enough to get your creative juices flowing, the try The Story Starter. I learned about this random sentence generator from John Dufresne’s blog and it looks like it will provide hours of entertainment. My story starter sentence? “The attractive scientist alerted the police inside the diner…
continue readingStory Inspiration of the Day
Okay, so this one is tailor-made for all your aspiring noir writers out there. Maybe the horror folks as well. Y’all should have a field day with this one. Check out that headline of that article.”Severed hand found in nude dancer’s home.” And the article also contains the gem that the hand was allegedly “a…
continue readingLiterary Jabs
To pound out some publicity for his upcoming book, Craig Davidson intends to fight a willing literary pugilist at his book launch in October. More often than not, publicists are trying to keep their writers out of trouble. But in this case, “the idea was thought up by his publicist, Stephen Myers at Penguin, who met…
continue readingNow Drop and Give Me Twenty Character Descriptions!
You might remember my rant about how the majority of books about writing are shit. As I’ve preached for some time now, The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction by John Dufresne and 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published and 14 Reasons Why It Just Might by Pat Walsh…
continue readingWho Gets Top Billing?
Roy Hattersley provides an interesting perspective on literary festivals in today’s Guardian. “At breakfast during the Keswick Festival, I heard two writers on the next table arguing about which of them was performing at the time of day reserved for the top of the bill,” Hattersley writes. “When I suggested to Penelope Lively that…
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