No literary genre ever really dies
Storytelling genres and formats come in and out of fashion. But they never truly disappear. They periodically return, and sometimes they just remain in disguise.
No literary genre ever really dies Read More »
Arts
Includes film & television, photography, fine arts, theatre, performance, and literature.
Don’t be afraid of the big themes
Embrace the big themes. Just don’t lean too hard on them.
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Not all geniuses are lone
We all benefit from creative collaborators, well-informed advisors, candid beta readers, and others who challenge and inspire us. Feeback helps us filter our own ideas.
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Procrastination isn’t always your enemy
Sometimes procrastination is a way for your mind to work on solving a problem, or a way of telling you to go down a different path.
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Dashiell Hammett
Hammett’s stories were filled with unexpected turns yet had the inevitability of Greek tragedy.
His characters were nuanced to the point of complete moral ambiguity.
Neil Gaiman’s eight rules of writing
“Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
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Marcel Duchamp
One of the most important collections of Duchamp’s works is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, just down the Expressway from where I was raised. I was a pre-teen with no significant art education, visiting the museum with my father, when we entered Gallery 182.
Toni Morrison on writing
“From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.”
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Mahogany Hall Stomp
I was thinking, for some reason, about Louis Armstrong and Mahogany Hall Stomp, the astonishing piece recorded March 1929. In it you can hear both New Orleans style – it was an older composition – as well as the innovations to come. “All of a sudden when Pops takes his solo [at 1:33], the piece
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Guilt, pickling swill, and ass trumpets
I was in the middle of reading Dinty W. Moore’s new book “To Hell With It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-inducing Inferno” from the University of Nebraska Press when the news broke that eight people were murdered at massage parlors around Atlanta. In addition to the Asian racism,
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