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I am a writer. I create innovative creative and business writing courses. I inspire others to tell their stories. My company's name is Writers Write. My email address is amanda@writerswrite.co.za

Elements of Literature

Elements of Literature

— 2 weeks ago with 198 notes
#literature  #writers  #writers write  #novels  #creative writing  #lit 
Where Writers Write - Poet, Wendy Cope, Writes Here Bloody Men by Wendy Cope Bloody men are like bloody buses —You wait for about a yearAnd as soon as one approaches your stopTwo or three others appear. You look at them flashing their indicators,Offering you a ride.You’re trying to read the destinations,You haven’t much time to decide. If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.Jump off, and you’ll stand there and gazeWhile the cars and the taxis and lorries go byAnd the minutes, the hours, the days Source for Image

Where Writers Write - Poet, Wendy Cope, Writes Here

Bloody Men by Wendy Cope

Bloody men are like bloody buses —
You wait for about a year
And as soon as one approaches your stop
Two or three others appear.

You look at them flashing their indicators,
Offering you a ride.
You’re trying to read the destinations,
You haven’t much time to decide.

If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.
Jump off, and you’ll stand there and gaze
While the cars and the taxis and lorries go by
And the minutes, the hours, the days

Source for Image

— 4 months ago with 15 notes
#Wendy Cope  #Where Writers Write  #Lit  #Poetry  #Literature  #Quotes 
"Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue."
Elmore Leonard
— 6 months ago with 73 notes
#Writing Advice  #Writing Tips  #Writing Quotes  #Elmore Leonard  #Quotes  #literature  #Writers Write 
"Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."
Fernando Pessoa
— 7 months ago with 52 notes
#Literature  #Quotes 
"Literature doesn’t have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer…. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens’ characters are Nigerians. …Literature may come from a specific place but it always lives in its own unique kingdom."
Ben Okri
— 8 months ago with 37 notes
#quotes  #Literature 
"All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town."
Leo Tolstoy
— 8 months ago with 97 notes
#Lit  #Quotes  #Literature  #Books 
"All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books."
Jean-Paul Sartre
— 9 months ago with 50 notes
#literature  #quotes 
"Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear."
Haruki Murakami
— 9 months ago with 641 notes
#literature  #quotes 
Happy Birthday, Charles Bukowski, born 16 August 1920, died 9 March 1994. Bukowski was a poet, novelist and short story writer. My Top 10 Bukowski Quotes 1. Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.2. Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.3. there is a loneliness in this world so great    that you can see it in the slow movement of    the hands of a clock.4. I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the colour of forgotten love.5. An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.6. those who escape hell    however    never talk about    it    and nothing much    bothers them    after    that.7. The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.8. Without literature, life is hell.9. It’s better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.10. If you are going to try, go all the way or don’t even start.  Image

Happy Birthday, Charles Bukowski, born 16 August 1920, died 9 March 1994. Bukowski was a poet, novelist and short story writer.

My Top 10 Bukowski Quotes

1. Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.
2. Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.
3. there is a loneliness in this world so great
    that you can see it in the slow movement of
    the hands of a clock.
4. I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the colour of forgotten love.
5. An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
6. those who escape hell
    however
    never talk about
    it
    and nothing much
    bothers them
    after
    that.
7. The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
8. Without literature, life is hell.
9. It’s better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.
10. If you are going to try, go all the way or don’t even start. 

Image

— 9 months ago with 130 notes
#Bukowski  #Quotes  #Lit  #Literature 

Literary Insults

(Source: The Huffington Post)

— 10 months ago with 63 notes
#literature  #quotes  #insults  #authors  #lit  #ecards 
Block That Adjective! by Alexander McCall Smith My bête noire—and there is nothing wrong with using the occasional French expression, although one does not want to sound too much like a menu—is overwriting. Something is overwritten when there is just too much of it. This may be because the writer has laboured the point and made a mountain out of a molehill, or because too many words are used. As a result, descriptions are cluttered and the prose quickly becomes unreadable. There is a lot of it about. The problem is that we speak English. Some languages, such as English or Spanish, have immensely rich vocabularies: If we want to describe something in English, we have a wide choice of words at our disposal and can say what we want to say in many different ways. The problem does not occur if one is writing in, say, Melanesian Pidgin, where rather few words are at your disposal and most of them are pithy in the extreme. For some people, being able to use all these words is rather like being faced with a chocolate box with multiple layers; the temptation to overindulge is just too great. The result is the use of too many adjectives, adverbs and subsidiary clauses. Such writing then begins to sound contrived. Nobody uses large numbers of adjectives when they think, and I believe that writing which one cannot actually think can very easily look wrong on the page. The real aim, of course, is conciseness. Concise prose knows what it wants to say, and says it. It does not embellish, except occasionally, and then for dramatic effect. It is sparing in its use of metaphor. And it is certainly careful in its use of adjectives. Look at the King James Bible, that magnificent repository of English at the height of its beauty. The language used to describe the creation of the world is so simple, so direct. “Let there be light, and there was light.” That sentence has immense power precisely because there are no adjectives. If we fiddle about with it, we lose that. “Let there be light, and there was a sort of matutinal,* glowing phenomenon that slowly transfused, etc.” No, that doesn’t work. There is a place for the adjective and for the descriptive passage, but these must be carefully handled. A piece of prose that had no adjectives would very quickly become sterile; so it really is a question of restraint. There is a psychological reason for this: If somebody sets out in great detail what is before us, we very quickly become bored. That is not the way we see the world; we look for salience, we look for the feature that will engage our interest. Think about how we describe a cityscape. We do not list and describe every building, we refer to one or two. Manhattan, for instance, can be conjured up with a description of the spire of the Chrysler building; the reader’s imagination can do the rest. And therein lies the problem. The trouble with overwritten prose is that it takes away from the reader the opportunity to imagine a scene. We do not want to be told everything; we want a few brushstrokes, a few carefully chosen adjectives, and then we can do the rest ourselves. It’s Roget’s fault, of course. I blame him and his wretched thesaurus. Put it away. * of or pertaining to morning; don’t use this word. —Alexander McCall Smith is the author of more than 60 books, including the “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series.  Source wsjonline Image guardianuk

Block That Adjective!

by Alexander McCall Smith

My bête noire—and there is nothing wrong with using the occasional French expression, although one does not want to sound too much like a menu—is overwriting. Something is overwritten when there is just too much of it. This may be because the writer has laboured the point and made a mountain out of a molehill, or because too many words are used. As a result, descriptions are cluttered and the prose quickly becomes unreadable. There is a lot of it about.

The problem is that we speak English. Some languages, such as English or Spanish, have immensely rich vocabularies: If we want to describe something in English, we have a wide choice of words at our disposal and can say what we want to say in many different ways. The problem does not occur if one is writing in, say, Melanesian Pidgin, where rather few words are at your disposal and most of them are pithy in the extreme.

For some people, being able to use all these words is rather like being faced with a chocolate box with multiple layers; the temptation to overindulge is just too great. The result is the use of too many adjectives, adverbs and subsidiary clauses. Such writing then begins to sound contrived. Nobody uses large numbers of adjectives when they think, and I believe that writing which one cannot actually think can very easily look wrong on the page.

The real aim, of course, is conciseness. Concise prose knows what it wants to say, and says it. It does not embellish, except occasionally, and then for dramatic effect. It is sparing in its use of metaphor. And it is certainly careful in its use of adjectives. Look at the King James Bible, that magnificent repository of English at the height of its beauty. The language used to describe the creation of the world is so simple, so direct. “Let there be light, and there was light.” That sentence has immense power precisely because there are no adjectives. If we fiddle about with it, we lose that. “Let there be light, and there was a sort of matutinal,* glowing phenomenon that slowly transfused, etc.” No, that doesn’t work.

There is a place for the adjective and for the descriptive passage, but these must be carefully handled. A piece of prose that had no adjectives would very quickly become sterile; so it really is a question of restraint. There is a psychological reason for this: If somebody sets out in great detail what is before us, we very quickly become bored. That is not the way we see the world; we look for salience, we look for the feature that will engage our interest. Think about how we describe a cityscape. We do not list and describe every building, we refer to one or two. Manhattan, for instance, can be conjured up with a description of the spire of the Chrysler building; the reader’s imagination can do the rest.

And therein lies the problem. The trouble with overwritten prose is that it takes away from the reader the opportunity to imagine a scene. We do not want to be told everything; we want a few brushstrokes, a few carefully chosen adjectives, and then we can do the rest ourselves. It’s Roget’s fault, of course. I blame him and his wretched thesaurus. Put it away.

* of or pertaining to morning; don’t use this word.

—Alexander McCall Smith is the author of more than 60 books, including the “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series. 

Source wsjonline

Image guardianuk

— 10 months ago with 24 notes
#lit  #fiction  #authors  #literature 
My 15 Favourite Quotes On Libraries It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home. ~Elizabeth Kostova An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them. ~Stephen Fry I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.” ~David Foster Wallace Madam, a circulating library in a town is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. ~Richard Brinsley Sheridan The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night. ~Isabel Allende My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn’t have any excuse to be stupid. ~Joan Bauer Libraries are our friends. ~Neil Gaiman Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too, that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence. ~Jan Morris I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. ~Jorge Luis Borges She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people. ~Catherynne M. Valente If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I’ll be all right as long as there’s a lending library. ~Stephen King What better place to kill time than a library? ~Diane Setterfield The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library. ~Albert Einstein  Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark…. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. ~Germaine Greer [His] library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore. ~Ray Bradbury Source: Writers Write by Amanda Patterson Image: Street Art Utopia

My 15 Favourite Quotes On Libraries

  1. It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home. ~Elizabeth Kostova
  2. An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them. ~Stephen Fry
  3. I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.” ~David Foster Wallace
  4. Madam, a circulating library in a town is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. ~Richard Brinsley Sheridan
  5. The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night. ~Isabel Allende
  6. My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn’t have any excuse to be stupid. ~Joan Bauer
  7. Libraries are our friends. ~Neil Gaiman
  8. Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too, that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence. ~Jan Morris
  9. I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. ~Jorge Luis Borges
  10. She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people. ~Catherynne M. Valente
  11. If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I’ll be all right as long as there’s a lending library. ~Stephen King
  12. What better place to kill time than a library? ~Diane Setterfield
  13. The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library. ~Albert Einstein 
  14. Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark…. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. ~Germaine Greer
  15. [His] library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore. ~Ray Bradbury
Source: Writers Write
by Amanda Patterson

Image: Street Art Utopia

— 10 months ago with 1509 notes
#libraries  #lit  #literature  #quotes  #Writers Write  #Amanda Patterson 
Circles of Influence

Circles of Influence

— 10 months ago with 64 notes
#literature  #writers  #books  #lit 
Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Favorite Books About Books The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco “A terrific postmodern Sherlock Holmesian intrigue set in a Benedictine monastery involving serial crime, the Inquisition, the power of knowledge and the written word, those who conspire to control what others think and read, and those who fight to preserve the light and beauty of creation, independent thinking, and reading. Make sure to make it through the slightly harder-to-navigate initial section, and you’ll find plenty of rewards once you plunge into the story proper. This is probably one of the best novels of its kind, and [it] offers a lot beyond the purely detectivesque story.” The Neverending Story by Michael Ende “Allegedly a children’s book, but actually a fable for all ages in which the magic of books and reading is illustrated through the wondrous journey of a kid who enters the world of the fabulous book he is reading. Has the scent and the flavor of old-school adventure stories, old bookstores, and a world that today may seem vanished. Delightful, sweet, and wise.” The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte “This deliciously dark and witty novel by my compatriot, the very talented Arturo Pérez-Reverte, is one of the greatest bibliophile mysteries ever. The old book lore is so well built into the plot that you’ll find yourself salivating at all the stuff you learn about how books were made. An intrigue with supernatural overtones, haunting chateaus, old cities in Europe riddled with mystery, and a cursed book that may or may not invoke the presence of the Prince of Darkness himself. This is a terrific book and a perfect point of entry into Pérez-Reverte’s world.” Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury “A fable for our times, a pitch-perfect tale of a future that looks too much like aspects of the present that invites us to think twice or thrice about it. There’s an element of elegy for literature, books, for the beauty and importance of the world of the mind that, I believe, could only have been written from the perspective of a very perceptive author born and raised in the U.S. Years ago I used to see the great, late Ray Bradbury around Los Angeles a lot. He did not drive, and you could see him wearing shorts and a kind of safari-like attire at bus stops, in bookstores… A year before his passing I went to a birthday bash a great bookstore in Glendale, Bookfellows, was throwing for him. He was already very old and not in good health, but he had plenty of wit, good humor, and a humanity that, to me, looked like the antidote to half of the world’s ills. Take this, and then explore the rest of his oeuvre.” On Writing by Stephen King “Most readers know the King through his many novels and stories. What not so many know is that he also wrote this little book about the craft of writing and the life of the writer. I believe this is the best book about the subject ever written, not to mention the most entertaining and probably useful. Totally devoid of pretension or snobbery and packed with intelligence, humor, and down-to-earth wisdom, any aspiring, or working, writer should read this and get invaluable lessons from the King. Don’t miss.” Atonement by Ian McEwan “A powerful and beautifully built tale of loss, guilt, and potentially dangerous powers of storytelling. The shaping of reality as a story, the moral dimension of interpreting reality through fiction, and the responsibility of the teller of tales are just a few of the themes explored in this brief and very well-made book, among the best in this author’s long career. Typewriters can kill. Find [out] all about it.” Via: Goodreads Image
Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Favorite Books About Books


The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

“A terrific postmodern Sherlock Holmesian intrigue set in a Benedictine monastery involving serial crime, the Inquisition, the power of knowledge and the written word, those who conspire to control what others think and read, and those who fight to preserve the light and beauty of creation, independent thinking, and reading. Make sure to make it through the slightly harder-to-navigate initial section, and you’ll find plenty of rewards once you plunge into the story proper. This is probably one of the best novels of its kind, and [it] offers a lot beyond the purely detectivesque story.”

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

“Allegedly a children’s book, but actually a fable for all ages in which the magic of books and reading is illustrated through the wondrous journey of a kid who enters the world of the fabulous book he is reading. Has the scent and the flavor of old-school adventure stories, old bookstores, and a world that today may seem vanished. Delightful, sweet, and wise.”

The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

“This deliciously dark and witty novel by my compatriot, the very talented Arturo Pérez-Reverte, is one of the greatest bibliophile mysteries ever. The old book lore is so well built into the plot that you’ll find yourself salivating at all the stuff you learn about how books were made. An intrigue with supernatural overtones, haunting chateaus, old cities in Europe riddled with mystery, and a cursed book that may or may not invoke the presence of the Prince of Darkness himself. This is a terrific book and a perfect point of entry into Pérez-Reverte’s world.”

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

“A fable for our times, a pitch-perfect tale of a future that looks too much like aspects of the present that invites us to think twice or thrice about it. There’s an element of elegy for literature, books, for the beauty and importance of the world of the mind that, I believe, could only have been written from the perspective of a very perceptive author born and raised in the U.S. Years ago I used to see the great, late Ray Bradbury around Los Angeles a lot. He did not drive, and you could see him wearing shorts and a kind of safari-like attire at bus stops, in bookstores… A year before his passing I went to a birthday bash a great bookstore in Glendale, Bookfellows, was throwing for him. He was already very old and not in good health, but he had plenty of wit, good humor, and a humanity that, to me, looked like the antidote to half of the world’s ills. Take this, and then explore the rest of his oeuvre.”

On Writing by Stephen King

“Most readers know the King through his many novels and stories. What not so many know is that he also wrote this little book about the craft of writing and the life of the writer. I believe this is the best book about the subject ever written, not to mention the most entertaining and probably useful. Totally devoid of pretension or snobbery and packed with intelligence, humor, and down-to-earth wisdom, any aspiring, or working, writer should read this and get invaluable lessons from the King. Don’t miss.”

Atonement by Ian McEwan

“A powerful and beautifully built tale of loss, guilt, and potentially dangerous powers of storytelling. The shaping of reality as a story, the moral dimension of interpreting reality through fiction, and the responsibility of the teller of tales are just a few of the themes explored in this brief and very well-made book, among the best in this author’s long career. Typewriters can kill. Find [out] all about it.”

Via: Goodreads

Image

— 10 months ago with 159 notes
#lit  #Carlos Ruiz Zafón  #books  #literature  #writers 
Top 10 Fictional Geek Dads →

10. Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker, Star Wars

  • Marital Status: Widower
  • Geek Type: Gear Head
  • Kids: Luke and Leia

9. The Doctor, Doctor Who

  • Marital Status: It’s complicated
  • Geek Type: It’s complicated (Varies depending on regeneration)
  • Kid(s): It’s complicated

8. Arthur Dent, Mostly Harmless

  • Marital Status: Single
  • Geek Type: Hitchhiker
  • Kid: Random (no, not random children. Her name is Random — Random Frequent Flier Dent).

7. Wayne Szalinski, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids

  • Marital Status: Married
  • Geek Type: Inventor
  • Kids: Amy and Nick

6. Kevin Flynn, Tron: Legacy

  • Marital Status: Widower
  • Geek Type:  Hacker
  • Kid: Sam

5. George McFly, Back to the Future

  • Marital Status: Married
  • Geek Type: Nerd/Sci-fi Author
  • Kids: Marty, Dave, Linda

4. Dr. Benton Quest, Johnny Quest

  • Marital Status: Widower
  • Geek Type: Scientist
  • Kid: Jonny

3. Caractacus Potts, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

  • Marital Status: Widower
  • Geek Type: Inventor
  • Kids: Jeremy and Jemima

2. Gomez Addams, The Addams Family

  • Marital Status: Married
  • Geek Type: Goth
  • Kids: Wednesday and Pugsley

1. Richard Castle, Castle

  • Marital Status: Divorced
  • Geek Type: Literary & Secret Fanboy
  • Kid: Alexis
— 11 months ago with 122 notes
#literature  #fathers day  #books  #lit 
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