Exploring Life: Web Clips

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

via 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice – ChronicleReview.com.

The Creative Nonfiction Foundation pursues educational and publishing initiatives in the genre of literary nonfiction. Its objectives are to provide a venue, the journal Creative Nonfiction, for high quality nonfiction prose (memoir, literary journalism, personal essay); to serve as the singular strongest voice of the genre, defining the ethics and parameters of the field; and to broaden the genre's impact in the literary arena by providing an array of educational services and publishing activities.

via Creative Nonfiction.

Lee Gutkind is the founding editor of Creative Nonfiction and prize-winning author or editor of more than a dozen books, the most recent of which, Almost Human: Making Robots Think, was featured on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. As founder of the creative nonfiction movement, according to Harper's Magazine, and the “godfather behind creative nonfiction” (Vanity Fair), Gutkind travels widely throughout the world giving workshops and readings, explaining the craft and the mission of the genre.

via Lee Gutkind – What’s New.

Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks, or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing – a sunset, or an old shoe – in absolute and simple amazement.

via Writing Short Stories – advice and inspiration for writing short stories and entering short story contests..

A Call for Slow Writing

By Lindsay Waters

What will it take to make essays the standard of achievement once again in the scholarly world? This is not where we are: Books are the gold standard for tenure in most of the humanities and some of the social sciences, so much so that journal articles almost don’t even count. As august a figure as Helen Vendler assured me recently that essays could never replace books as a basis for tenuring junior colleagues. So, in departments of English as on Wall Street, counting is all that counts. “It’s the bottom line, stupid.” Countability is the thing whereby you’ll catch the conscience of the dean, as a friend of Hamlet might advise the young Danish assistant professor or the young Shakespeare scholar. Articles don’t make a thumping sound when you drop them on a table the way a body might in Six Feet Under.

via A Call for Slow Writing :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education’s Source for News, Views and Jobs.

Chicago Manual of Style Citation Guide – Ohio State University Libraries

Chicago Manual of Style Citation Guide
[PDF version Author-Date style - for the sciences]

[PDF version Notes-Bibliography style - for the arts, history, literature]

Introduction

This guide is based on the The Chicago Manual of Style 15th ed. rev. (University of Chicago Press, 2003). Examples are shown for both the Author-Date style of citation recommended for natural sciences and social sciences, as well as the Notes-Bibliography style used for fine arts, history, literature, etc.

A List Apart: Articles: Content-tious Strategy

Content strategists combine the skills of writers, editors and publishers to think in a holistic way about what users should see when they visit a site[.]

Linda A. Lavid, award-winning author and lecturer

Can You Write Fiction?

There are several aspects to writing fiction. Rendering what John Gardner in The Art of Fiction describes as a ‘vivid and continuous dream’ is a complicated affair. Story is created from the imagination of a writer, who in turn must translate it onto a page of symbols so that another person can read, absorb, and experience the story in a similar fashion. It’s a remarkable process when you think about it. So, are you up for the challenge or is the writer’s quintessential question nipping away inside: Do I have the talent?

We imagine talent as some huge reservoir of subconscious knowledge that some lucky people are born with. We think of Shakespeare and Mozart and Einstein. But the truth is we all have talents of many kinds and measures. Think of your family and friends, and assuredly you can name many of their strengths unique to them. Talent is nothing more, or less, than an individual ability. And while there are gifted writers, I do not believe that having an innate talent is imperative to become an author.

Fiction demands a working knowledge of many points of craft. And while mastering craft can be daunting, each one of us has skills to meet the challenge. If you have an analytical mind, cause and effect will be solid. If you are intuitive, your story will take imaginative twists. If you are emotional, you will have a true internal compass to tell a riveting story. If you are a global thinker, you will see the whole. If you are a detail person, your story will be tight. If you are a visual, auditory, or tactile person, your story will be vivid. If you are curious, writing will never bore you. If you are empathic, your characters will be believable. If you’re old, you’ll bring a wide array of experience into the process. If you’re young, your story will be fresh. If you’re stubborn and relentless, your story, at last, will be finished. So what’s your talent? Most likely you have many, some not even touched upon.

Before going further, I propose that writing can be both taught and learned. I also submit that the quality you need most is neither talent nor knowledge but the mad, unrelenting desire to tell a story.

And with this passion, walk to the end of the diving board, loosen your shoulders, and take the plunge.

You should make one, too.

The trick to novel writing is maintaining faith in yourself as a writer and of the importance of what you are doing. You have a lifetime of conditioning to fight, which will keep telling you that you are wasting your time putting hundreds of hours into something you may never get paid for. Another voice will snidely remind you of all the novels uncompleted, and all the completed novels unpublished, and all the published novels unsuccessful. Another will tell you that the very stuff of your being is unworthy, your soul too thin and your brain too thick. These voices are not yours — they’re the echoes of the status quo, ground in by endless repetition. You can fight them with a good argument or you can get a partial lobotomy.