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"Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make. Good. Art."
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(via The Most Comma Mistakes - NYTimes.com)
I have such a strange relationship with commas. I’d much rather use em dashes, italics, bold, or even misspelled words rather than commas to get my point across.
Read The Most Comma Mistakes and you’ll want to bitch slap commas too.
I tend to overuse commas, which I suppose makes me a bit of a comma slut.
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Ken Burns: On Story (by Redglass Pictures)
Abraham Lincoln wins the Civil War and then he decides he’s got enough time to go to the theatre. That’s a good story. When Thomas Jefferson said “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”, he owned a hundred human beings and never saw the hypocrisy, never saw the contradiction, and more importantly never saw fit in his lifetime to free any one of them. That’s a good story.
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Salman Rushdie on Censorship
The New Yorker posted Salman Rushdie’s lecture at the PEN World Voices Festival. Really interesting read.
Consider, if you will, the air. Here it is, all around us, plentiful, freely available, and broadly breathable. And yes, I know, it’s not perfectly clean or perfectly pure, but here it nevertheless is, plenty of it, enough for all of us and lots to spare. When breathable air is available so freely and in such quantity, it would be redundant to demand that breathable air be freely provided to all, in sufficient quantity for the needs of all. What you have, you can easily take for granted, and ignore. There’s just no need to make a fuss about it. You breathe the freely available, broadly breathable air, and you get on with your day. The air is not a subject. It is not something that most of us want to discuss.
Imagine, now, that somewhere up there you might find a giant set of faucets, and that the air we breathe flows from those faucets, hot air and cold air and tepid air from some celestial mixer-unit. And imagine that an entity up there, not known to us, or perhaps even known to us, begins on a certain day to turn off the faucets one by one, so that slowly we begin to notice that the available air, still breathable, still free, is thinning. The time comes when we find that we are breathing more heavily, perhaps even gasping for air. By this time, many of us would have begun to protest, to condemn the reduction in the air supply, and to argue loudly for the right to freely available, broadly breathable air. Scarcity, you could say, creates demand.
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(Source: puttingmannersonafeminist, via battlecriesandbananas)
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"And make no mistake about it, you are dumb. You’re a group of incredibly well-educated dumb people. I was there. We all were there. You’re barely functional. There are some screw-ups headed your way. I wish I could tell you that there was a trick to avoiding the screw-ups, but the screw-ups, they’re a-coming for ya. It’s a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb."
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High ResolutionWhy You Need A Copy Editor. A delightfully passive-aggressive copy editor at the Toronto Star marked up this memo announcing the elimination of copy-editing jobs at the Toronto Star.
(via fletter)
OHOHO this is brilliant.
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I read “50 Shades of Grey” because Faulkner told me to
Q: What is the best training for writing? Courses in writing? Or what?
WF: Read, read, read! Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad; see how they do it. When a carpenter learns his trade, he does so by observing. Read! You’ll absorb it. Write. If it is good you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.
-William Faulkner (via)
(Source: bricorama, via teaforonesvp)
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"2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material."
-6 tips on writing from John Steinbeck (via explore-blog)
I make a lot of excuses when it comes to my writing.
(Source: , via explore-blog)
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Befriending Your Creativity - DesignTAXI.com
For years, I’ve been actively researching and experimenting with ways to make creating effortless, joyful and fun.
Here are three ways I use to create—writing, parenting, life—with a light heart and a saunter in my step. See what you think.
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"Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."
- Carl Sagan on books, 1980. (via explore-blog) -
Jonathan Harris: Cowbird And Humanizing The Web (by Piers Fawkes)
Jonathan Harris, founder of Cowbird.com, talks about capturing the fleeting with storytelling.
Cowbird is a great collective project. If you haven’t already requested your invite, do it now!
(via Swiss Miss)
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High ResolutionThe recipe for writing success? Kill your characters – beautiful literary infographic from “slow journalism magazine” Delayed Gratification reverse-engineers what makes a prize-winning novel. The results corroborate Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to “be a sadist” and make awful things happen to your lead characters, “no matter how sweet or innocent” they may be.
(ᔥ Visual News)
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"The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not."
-Hugh McLeod
(via swissmiss)
Favorite Things
Twenty-something.
Atlanta.
Hedonist.
The views expressed here are my own and do not represent the views of my employers. No one should be held responsible for my stupid thoughts.
