Curso de Escrita Criativa na Biblioteca Municipal de S. Lázaro

Já se encontram abertas as inscrições para o curso de Escrita Criativa, que se irá iniciar a 13 julho na BM S.Lázaro. Para mais informações ligue para 210 99 822.

Escritores são estranhos híbridos... / "...writers I know are weird hybrids."

Vincent Giarrano

“Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There’s a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing’s kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there’s also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person.”

David Foster Wallace 

Sinceramente, gostava de ter sido eu a escrever isto! Que inveja! Na mouche!

Os rituais diários de grandes escritores / Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

Fernando Vicente

Os rituais diários de grandes escritores
O que os hábitos e manias de autores de sucesso nos ensinam sobre produtividade

Por Danilo Venticinque

"Uma das fórmulas mais eficientes para se tornar improdutivo é passar o dia lendo sobre produtividade. A internet e as prateleiras de autoajuda estão cheias de textos que querem nos ensinar a trabalhar melhor. Seus conselhos muitas vezes se contradizem. Compará-los é uma tarefa para várias tardes ociosas, que poderiam ser aproveitadas de outras formas — trabalhando, por exemplo.

(...)

Talvez por duvidar dos mercadores da produtividade, o escritor americano Mason Currey buscou inspiração noutro tipo de guru. Obcecado pela rotina diária de grandes artistas, ele decidiu reunir informações sobre seus métodos de trabalho. O resultado da pesquisa está no livro Daily rituals (Knopf, 304 páginas), recém-lançado nos Estados Unidos. "Quase todos os dias da semana, por um ano e meio, eu acordei às 5h30 da manhã, escovei os dentes, tomei uma xícara de café e me sentei para escrever sobre como as mentes mais brilhantes dos últimos quatro séculos se dedicavam a essa mesma tarefa — encontrar tempo para fazer seu melhor trabalho e organizar seus horários para trabalhar de forma produtiva e criativa." O resultado é um simpático almanaque biográfico, com detalhes mundanos sobre 161 mentes geniais, e um guia de produtividade capaz de consumir alguns dias de preguiça".

Leia na íntegra AQUI.

Um livro que fica na calha para leitura futura, Daily rituals, onde o americano Mason Currey descreve os hábitos de trabalho de 161 artistas. Não sei se para bem da minha produtividade ou do meu  ócio.

Custa-me escrever mas adoro ter escrito / “I hate writing, I love having written.”

 

Anne Hathaway como Jane Austen

“I hate writing, I love having written.”

Dorothy Parker

A book.it procura novos talentos nacionais na área da escrita

A book.it quer promover os novos talentos nacionais na área da escrita. Assim, decorre até 31 de Maio o período de candidaturas à segunda edição concurso literário book.it, que pretende promover a leitura e os autores portugueses.

Todos aqueles que têm a paixão de escrever e sonham ver um livro seu editado, têm aqui a oportunidade para converterem as suas histórias em realidades impressas.

Todos os amantes da escrita que não tenham nenhuma obra publicada e que desejem partilhar as suas histórias têm a oportunidade das suas vidas neste concurso. Os participantes podem concorrer com romances ou novelas, histórias de vida e livros de contos e ainda obras poéticas, sendo que cada concorrente apenas pode entregar um único texto inédito.

Se quer ver o seu livro editado, basta remeter por CTT a sua história original, acompanhada de sinopse, cópia do cartão de cidadão ou bilhete de identidade e ficha de inscrição preenchida, de acordo com as condições descritas no regulamento oficial.

Após a recepção das participações, seguir-se-á uma fase de análise das obras, estando esta análise a cargo de um júri composto por elementos da book.it, um elemento da Lux Woman e um elemento da Leya. O vencedor será contactado durante o mês de agosto, sendo anunciado em Novembro, aquando da edição e publicação da sua obra em livro.

Na primeira edição, que contou com cerca de 300 obras recebidas, Nuno Nepomuceno sagrou-se vencedor, com a obra «Espião Português», tendo esta história sido editada em livro pela editora ASA, parceira oficial do concurso.

O regulamento e restantes informações podem ser consultados em http://www.bookit.pt/page/concurso-literário-bookit.

Os trabalhos devem ser enviados para:

Concurso Literário book.it, Parque de Negócios de Empresas

Sonae Maia Business Center, Estrada Nacional 13 – km 6,78

Lugar do Espido – Via Norte 

4470-179 Maia

Fonte: Diário Digital

Nove citações sobre escrita de James Patterson / James Patterson: Nine Writing Quotes

 Guy Cambier (1923-2008)

James Patterson: Nine Writing Quotes

1. I write first thing in the morning, about 360 days a year.
2. I find that I’m working on three or more projects at any given time. For some reason, this is a very comfortable way for me to work.
3. Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.
4. I’ve always concentrated on the product. There are very few cases where people or enterprises or franchises have succeeded unless the product is really good for that audience. [Writers] always want to hear it’s the advertising. It isn’t—it’s the product.
5. As I do with all of my books, I outlined The Beach House from the beginning to end.
6. I’m always pretending that I’m sitting across from somebody. I’m telling them a story, and I don’t want them to get up until it’s finished. I’m very conscious of an audience. I’m very conscious that I’m an entertainer. Something like 73 percent of my readers are college graduates, so you can’t condescend to people. You’ve got to tell them a story that they will be willing to pay money to read.
7. Knowledge is valuable, but imagination is invaluable.
8. People that really know me consider me to be an incredible underachiever. Because I was supposed to, you know, really write nice, serious books. And… I don’t know, got derailed, and here I am.
9. If it’s commercial fiction that you want to write, it’s story, story, story. You’ve got to get a story where if you tell it to somebody in a paragraph, they’ll go, “Tell me more.” And then when you start to write it, they continue to want to read more. And if you don’t, it won’t work.

From an interview in The Telegraph with Adam Higginbotham

Patterson is an American author who has sold an estimated 260 million books worldwide. Since 2006, one out of every 17 fiction books sold was a Patterson title. He is the first author to have #1 new titles simultaneously on The New York Times adult and children’s best-sellers lists. He is the only author to have five new hard-cover novels debut at #1 on the list in one year - a feat he’s accomplished every year since 2005. Patterson has had 19 consecutive #1 New York Times best-selling novels, and holds the New York Times record for most Hard-cover Fiction best-selling titles by a single author (76), which is also a Guinness World Record.

Algumas instruções sobre a escrita e a vida / "Some Instructions on Writing and Life"

"Reader” de Ryan Holloway (2008)

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Gostava de ter este livro.

"A escrita não tem nada que se lhe diga!" / "There is nothing to writing"

Basta sentamo-nos em frente a uma máquina de escrever (ou um teclado) ... e sangrar.

Mensagem para principiantes criativos / A message for creative beginners

A escrita como terapia / Writing as therapy

 Kelly Vivanco

"Writing is a form of therapy; how do all those who do not write, compose, or paint manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in the human condition?"

Graham Greene 

Regras para uma escrita eficiente por Kurt Vonnegut / Rules for effective writing by Kurt Vonnegut

Rules for effective writing by Kurt Vonnegut, author of Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five:

1. Use a time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel that 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.

7. Write to please just one person.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible.

http://www.goodnet.org/articles/358

10 conselhos para se tornar um escritor melhor / 10 steps to become a better writer

A combinação perfeita de palavras / The perfect combination of words

Lisa G.

“I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt of the chin, a change in the atmosphere. Done well, novel-writing can combine lyricism with practicality in a way that makes one think of grand tapestries, both functional and beautiful.” 

Lauren Willig

                                                

Ter uma voz / Having a voice

Cristina Bellacicco

“Writing and being successful at it is not about being the next Ernest Hemingway. It’s about having a voice, and presenting it with passion in a way that inspires. It’s about being honest, raw, and real.”

Caroline Makepeace

10 regras para escrever ficção / 10 rules for writing fiction

De Jonathan Franzen:

1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
3. Never use the word “then” as a conjunction ­ – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.
4. Write in the third person unless a ­really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly.
5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6. The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.
7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8. It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

Fonte

Entre a leitura e a escrita / Between reading and writing

Ivan Olinsky (1878-1962)

“Reading usually precedes writing and the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.”

Susan Sontag

                                                           

Não sejas normal, conta a história que só tu podes contar / Get crazy: start telling the stories that only you can tell

“Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you. Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view. There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.”  

Neil Gaiman

Talvez eu não escreva para ninguém / "Perhaps I write for no one"

Pierre Mornet

“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for, when they scrawl their names in the snow.” 

Margaret Atwood, from “The Blind Assassin” (2000)

10 citações sobre escrita criativa / 10 quotes about writing

“One day i will find the right words and they will be simple”
<>

Jack Kerouac

“… You learn and grow with your characters - don’t think there’s any special merit in having a lofty distance from them. Your books will always be about you to some degree - they will always reflect your view of the world in some way. In the end it doesn’t matter where your creativity comes from - whether research, imagination, real life - in the end you always write about what you know, wherever your knowledge has come from.” <> Anna Maxted “You write your first draft with your heart and you re-write with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think.” <> Sean Connery no filme Finding Forrester     “Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.” Arundhati Roy, O Deus das Pequenas coisas “But somewhere in the heat of magic that boundary between word and the thing ruptures. It cracks, and the one flows back into the other, and the two meld together and fuse. Language gets tangled up with the world it describes.” Lev Grossman, The Magicians “Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas—abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken—and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.”  Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things <> “A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.” Ursula Le Guin  “There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas, of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence—an overwhelming determination to succeed.”  Sophy Burnham “Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the most. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” William Faulkner “We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.” Neil Gaiman in his Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech, The Graveyard Book.

6 citações sobre escrita e uma mulher / 6 quotes about writing and a woman

"The Letter", Alfred Stevens

“You can’t write well with only the nice parts of your character, and only about nice things. And I don’t want even to try anymore. I want to use everything, including hate and envy and lust and fear.”

 Alison Lurie

“No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart’s blood.” W. Somerset Maugham No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.” E. B. White “There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.” Ernest Hemingway "Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things." Ray Douglas Bradbury

“‎Everybody who writes is engaged in the remarkable enterprise of making consciousness manifest—catching the slipperiest of substance, a thought, and nailing it to a page. It is amazing, when you think about it, that people should even try to do such a thing; that they would occasionally succeed nearly miraculous. And, indeed, there is something spiritual about the act of writing. When it’s done in a slovenly manner or in bad faith, it seems somehow sacrilegious. When it’s done well, we should stand back and regard it with a kind of reverence.”

Ben Yagoda, The Sound on the Page