So true
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Category Archives: INSIGHT
INSIGHT
Faulkner vs. Hemingway
Take heed, my friends–even Nobel prize winning literary artists embrace trash talking as part of their competitive spirits. Behold below this exchange between William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.
Faulkner: “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
Hemingway: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
Would you like to know who won this debate?
Read The Old Man And The Sea.
INSIGHT: Marcus Aurelius
Vonnegut On Short Stories
Some advice on writing short stories, from Kurt Vonnegut himself:
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.*
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”