Writing // Current

Cut-Up Machine, Random Writing & New Media

Cut-Up is a method for introducing aleatory techinques inside the creative process. It’s historically related to writing in... more

VictorGodot
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100 fun & useful search engines for writers

This list of 100 different search tools can help you manage your business, become a better biz tech or web writer, find primary... more

sunnyspeaks
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Author Michael Crichton has 'died unexpectedly'

Prolific novelist and "ER" creator Michael Crichton has passed away. He was 66. Perhaps best known for being the author... more

huffamoose2k
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Grammar-101: Don't get caught in a dirty toilet! (writing tips)

Tips and great links the pitfalls, including this gem: 'Bad Grammar On A Blog Is Like A Dirty Toilet In A Restaurant'... more

ilikepretty
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A Hyperbole Halloween

Singer/Songwriter Jaymay has had language in her blood for a long time.

chapinyoung
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StreetArTrip - English Subtitles

StreetArTrip A trip on Uk's street culture with Th3Luca, winner of an italian contest sponsored by TIMTribù and an... more

StreetAcademy
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INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY!!!

364 DAYS A YEAR ALL CAPS IS A BIG NO NO. BUT NOT TODAY!!! CELEBRATE INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY AND KEEP IT IN ALL CAPS.

Swiyyah
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Now on CD: British Library's treasure trove of authorial voices

Rare recordings of some of the last century's greatest writers are to be released for the first time - from F Scott Fitzgerald reciting Othello to Tennessee Williams lambasting critics and Raymond Chandler drunkenly slurring his way through an interview with Ian Fleming.

The British Library CDs are a literary goldmine, with recordings of 30 British writers and 27 from the US, most of whom are being heard for the first time since they were in front of the microphone. They include the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf, the sole recording of Arthur Conan Doyle, battily explaining the importance of spiritualism and the existence of telepathy, and Gertrude Stein incomprehensibly explaining how she writes.

"We have opened up a real treasure trove," said Richard Fairman, of the library's sound archive. "The reason people love hearing the CDs is because we read these authors and we feel we know them through reading their work. But when we hear them speak it's like meeting them in person. It's not quite as good as having them walk up to you, but it's not bad."

If you were to meet Vladimir Nabokov, it would be an alarming experience, on the basis of his broadcast. The author of Lolita answers questions in the style of a ham actor reciting poetry. He is asked if writing is a pleasure or drudgery: "Pleasure and agony while composing the book in my mind. Harrowing irritation when strolling with my tools and viscera, the pencil that needs resharpening, the bladder that has to be drained, the word that I always mis-spell and always have to look up."

Tennessee Williams, on the other hand, sounds as you might expect, with a wonderful, warm southern drawl. In the 1959 edition of the BBC's Frankly Speaking he says people have taken advantage of him. "I'm an extremely malleable person. Almost anybody can twist me round their finger. And I've been twisted around so many fingers that I feel like a multiple pretzel."

He concedes critics can kill a play. "It's a very humiliating experience and an unfair one because, if a play on which you've worked say two years or three years or even, in the case of Orpheus Descending, 17 years off and on, its fate can be decided in a couple of hours of reflection."

One of the most poignant recordings is Joe Orton, a week before he was murdered by his lover Kenneth Halliwell. He explains he has done well out of Loot but wants to save his money "because I shan't always be young and I don't want to do anything grand with it, because there's nothing I particularly want to do, but I would like to sort of put it away so that when I'm not writing any more ... I shall be able to go away and do something else."

He adds: "I only have so much inspiration. I think any playwright does. It's like a boxer, a really good playwright's career is quite short. A boxer's career is usually 10 years and then they start to get punchy, which I think playwrights do as well. Shakespeare's career was pretty short ... probably 15 years. And he wrote some pretty rum plays at the beginning of his life. I hope I've never written anything as bad as the early Shakespeares."

One of the jolliest interviewees is PG Wodehouse, in conversation with Alistair Cooke in 1963. They talk jocularly about a new theory that automation is going to throw so many people out of work that by the year 2000 every middle-class family will need four servants to keep people employed.

The drunkest interviewee is Raymond Chandler, who had been at the whisky before his 1958 interview with his friend Ian Fleming.

The British Library CDs are the latest in its series of historic recordings. Fairman said there were still gaps in the sound archive, and if anybody had recordings of DH Lawrence, John Galsworthy and George Orwell they should get in touch.

The Spoken Word: British Writers and American Writers is released tomorrow by the British Library, price £19.95 eachRare recordings of some of the last century's greatest writers are to be released for the first time - from F Scott... more

khaosworks
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28 days ago

Poetry Open Amateur International Contest.... Fake

Did you ever realized that there are plenty of people that are being abused and lost poems world wide? Original pieces of art... more

rosyjane
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29 days ago

100+ free open courseware links for writers

Writers today need to understand how to diversify by writing for different markets. This list of 100 free open courseware links... more

sunnyspeaks
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4 responses

29 days ago

StreetArTrip - sulle tracce della Street Art made in UK

StreetArTrip: Un viaggio sulle rotte della street culture made in UK. Protagonisti di questo viaggio sono Th3luca, vincitore del... more

StreetAcademy
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1 month ago

Forget Sorrow

A Graphic Novel in progress by award-winning author-artist, Belle Yang. To be published by W. W. Norton, Fall 2010 How to... more

longtimers
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1 month ago

Always Come Home To Me

Artist and author Belle Yang shows us the original artwork used in her award winning picture book Always Come Home To Me. ... more

longtimers
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1 month ago

Student arrested for writing zombie story

And it wasn't because the story lacked originality, story arcs or decent characters. No, he was arrested for making terrorist... more

Simon_S
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1 month ago

Fifteen years after her Nobel, Toni Morrison continues to inspire

Fifteen years ago this month, the novelist Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature, the second American woman and the first black American to do so. On this anniversary, we should once again celebrate her accomplishments.

Born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, Toni Morrison has written an unparalleled body of work. Citing her visionary narratives, the Swedish Academy praised her ability to delve into language that “wants to liberate from the fetters of race,” while dazzling us with poetry.

Among her most-read novels, “The Bluest Eye” is a young girl’s lyrical lament for beauty, while the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Beloved” is a matricidal tragedy centered around slavery and its excruciating aftermath.

Her most recent novel, “A Mercy,” is set in part in late seventeenth century Maryland at the beginning of the slave trade. At its center is Florens, a girl who is exchanged for a bad debt. Like all of Morrison’s heroines, she is not quite what she appears and displays a powerful will coupled with an endearing vulnerability that continuously leaves the reader both exuberant and heartbroken.

While writing nine groundbreaking novels, Morrison has also taken time to pen a book of literary criticism and edit two anthologies, one on the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill hearings and the other on the O. J. Simpson murder trial. And she has written a libretto based on the life of Margaret Garner, who was the inspiration for “Beloved.”

She has also been indirectly involved in this year’s presidential race, due to an essay she wrote for The New Yorker magazine as President Clinton faced impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky affair ten years ago. Because of the tropes he represented, she wrote, because he was born poor from a single parent household, sexualized and persecuted — “white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President.” Often quoted out of context and without the nuance of her essay, these words kept resurfacing this year even after she endorsed the man who, black skin notwithstanding, might actually become our first black president.

Two years ago, after the riots that plagued several Paris suburbs, she conducted a month-long residency at the Louvre Museum, where she invited slam poets from troubled neighbourhoods to perform their work, with iconic paintings as a backdrop.

I was lucky enough to have been among the other writers she welcomed to the Louvre, and we spent a wonderful afternoon discussing her chosen theme, “The Foreigner’s Home.”

“Foreign is the designation of the curious,” she said in her inaugural lecture, “the rupture between self and society. Home is where the memory of the self dwells. Whether those memories spawn or shrivel determines who we are and determines what we may become.”

With words that continue to inspire today, she encouraged the young poets and the rest of us to summon strength from difficult circumstances.

“The point is that you can use your disadvantages,” she added. “Out of disadvantages and energy comes a new thing that has never been seen before.”

Recently, Horace Engdahl, a top member of the jury that awards the Nobel Prize for literature said that unlike their European counterparts, American writers are too isolated and insular, too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture to participate in the “big dialogue of literature.”

No matter who wins the Nobel Prize for literature this year, Toni Morrison has already proven him wrong.Fifteen years ago this month, the novelist Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature, the second American woman and the... more

goldenways
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1 month ago

Head of Nobel Literature Prize says US is "too ignorant" to Compete Regarding Great Writing

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: the top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.
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Counters the head of the U.S. National Book Foundation: "Put him in touch with me, and I'll send him a reading list."

As the Swedish Academy enters final deliberations for this year's award, permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said it's no coincidence that most winners are European.

"Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world ... not the United States," he told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview Tuesday.

He said the 16-member award jury has not selected this year's winner, and dropped no hints about who was on the short list. Americans Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates usually figure in speculation, but Engdahl wouldn't comment on any names.

Speaking generally about American literature, however, he said U.S. writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture," dragging down the quality of their work.

"The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining."

His comments were met with fierce reactions from literary officials across the Atlantic.

"You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures," said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.

"And if he looked harder at the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the generation of Roth, Updike, and DeLillo, as well as in many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English. None of these poor souls, old or young, seem ravaged by the horrors of Coca-Cola." STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: the top member of the award jury believes... more