Nov
10th
Tue
10th
Oct
14th
Wed
14th
Artists don’t talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it’s stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.
Oct
12th
Mon
12th
Video Editing Lessons
This week, I’ve spent most of my time editing videos for something at work. It’s something I’ve been wanting to spend some time with anyway, and as I’ve said before, throwing yourself in at the deep-end is the best way to learn anything (picture-in-picture footage is a particular pain, if you’re wondering).
However, a couple of things I’ve learned:
- I need a faster computer.
- I need a bigger screen (or two).
All donations gratefully accepted. ;-)
Oct
1st
Thu
1st
any opportunity to work professionally making films, whether they’re commercials, which are basically really short films, or doing short films yourself… anything like that sort of gives you a better appreciation of where you are gonna start to accrue costs and where things are gonna get expensive and where things are gonna take time and where you are gonna need different equipment. I think any opportunity to shoot is an education and gets you ready in some ways for doing feature films.
Wikipedia: Kurt Vonnegut
inky:
In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:
- Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
- Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the end as possible.
- 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.
- 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.
- Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell 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.
Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that Flannery O’Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that.
