July 2012
15 posts
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In a New Yorker piece last month, Jonah Lehrer wrote about the neuroscience of choking under pressure:
Choking is actually triggered by a specific mental mistake: thinking too much. The sequence of events typically goes like this: When people get anxious about performing, they naturally become particularly self-conscious; they begin scrutinizing actions that are best performed on autopilot. The...
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Rule #19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
Pixar’s rules for storytelling.
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“She started writing notes and keeping them under her pillow, and then she...”
– Emily Brontë, born today in 1818 (and the subject of Juliet Barker’s literary biography The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors)
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“If you write a story about Twitter being down, but you can’t Tweet it out,...”
– “Twitter Is Down For Most Users” in USA Today
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Here is the opening of Fifty Shades of Grey:
I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror.
I often scowl with joy and kittens, so I’m glad that was clarified.
[via The Missouri Review]
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“The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe...”
– Ernest Hemingway
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“If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always...”
– Ernest Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast
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“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.”
– Charlotte’s Web
(Happy 113th birthday, E.B. White.)
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“Sometimes you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and...”
– John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars
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