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Get PocketAs a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut—dear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegut—will always be one of my favorites.
Writing is intimidating. There’s this expectation of artful precision, mercurial grammatical rules, and the weird angst that comes with writing for other people.
The pen is dead. It was murdered by the finger. “Hmm, maybe we have one upstairs,” I said as we both began a detective-like search for anything that resembled a vessel for ink. We scoured the home office, kitchen drawers, bedrooms, even looking through our cars. But again, no pen.
This year, I talked to nearly 50 different writers for the By Heart series, a weekly column about beloved quotes and cherished lines. Each author shared the life-changing, values-shaping passages that have helped sustain creative practice throughout his or her career.
This is the year you become a writer. And what do writers do? They write, of course. There’s nothing mystical or magical about it. You just have to show up and do the work: place butt in chair, fingers on keys, and start typing.
In one of my favorite Stephen King interviews, for The Atlantic, he talks at length about the vital importance of a good opening line. “There are all sorts of theories,” he says, “it’s a tricky thing.
“Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.”
I‘ve been working with self development advice for a large percentage of my life. I’ve come across a lot of concepts and ideas as well as invented quite a few of my own. But the following is one of the most important ideas I’ve stumbled across in my life:
There’s an inherent fascination with the lives and doings of great artists, arising from the accurate intuition that the work and the life are continuous—that there’s no real boundary between them, that the work is a crystallization of the life, and that the life is itself an uncaptured crea
Cut to: Me, author of a soon-to-be published biography of the 1940s/’50s wrestler and pop culture figure who called himself Gorgeous George. I’m on the phone with the woman in charge of selling HarperCollins books to the movies. Time: 2008 or so.
When Jack Handey sold his first jokes to Steve Allen in 1977, Allen sent him a letter offering him $100 and telling him his name sounded like a product, not a person. “Say homemakers, take a look at the new Jack Handey,” Allen wrote.
If you’ve gone to the movies recently, you may have felt a strangely familiar feeling: You’ve seen this movie before.
Timeless wisdom and practical advice on the pleasures and perils of the written word and the creative life.
“In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.” “Sleep is the greatest creative aphrodisiac,” a wise woman once said.
Having trouble making the scenes in your novel work their magic? In this article, I’ll show you how to write the “perfect” scene. Maybe you think it’s impossible to write the perfect scene.
Good writing is a mixture of the calculated and the instinctual. No one writes through pure dazed inspiration; questions of craft and calculation enter in quite quickly.
Ernest Hemingway has contributed a great deal to the collected advice of great writers, from his famous admonition against the dangers of ego to his short and stellar Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
Most serious writers and online publishers are relentlessly on the prowl for fresh inspiration to fuel both their creativity and productivity.
When did you decide to write what became your first book? What were you doing for a living at the time? Chuck Klosterman (first book Fargo Rock City): I got a job at the Akron Beacon Journal in Akron, Ohio, in 1998.
A novelist scrawling away in a notebook in seclusion may not seem to have much in common with an NBA player doing a reverse layup on a basketball court before a screaming crowd. But if you could peer inside their heads, you might see some striking similarities in how their brains were churning.
Kurt Vonnegut has given us some of the most timeless advice on the art and craft of writing — from his 8 rules for a great story to his insights on the shapes of stories to his formidable daily routine.
What's the secret to writing well? As I've said previously here, an awful lot of people seem to think they know, yet their "rules for writers" are almost always (pardon the technical linguistics jargon) bullshit. For example, "Show, don't tell" is frequently bad advice.