Estantes emolduradas / Framed bookshelves

 

Muito bonitas!

3 dicas para escritores iniciantes / 3 tips to aspiring writers

"1. Tear into it

In her book, Practical Tips for Writing Popular Fiction (Writers Digest), novelist Robyn Carr suggests you study fiction to become a better writer. This is great advice. Read a book once as a dreamer, a second time as detective. Start looking at how other authors are doing it. How do they structure their sentences? How much dialogue do they use? What are the main plot points? Don’t just do it on good books but on those that disappointed you. Try to find the knocks in the engine.

Picasso said to copy others was necessary but to copy yourself is pathetic. That’s a good point. I’m not suggesting you copy or steal other stories – but to look at the structure behind the stories of others. You then start to use this to build your own stories.

Tip: Type out the first page or chapter of a novel you’ve read. You’ll be so close to the work, you’ll see the structure emerge first hand.

2. It’s in the detail

When learning our craft, we learn to pay careful attention to detail. We start to see how important it is to paint our words with the right colour, shape and size. The right detail makes your writing come to life, and helps us build a believable story world.  Sometimes we forget that what we see in our minds as writers isn’t available to the reader – we have to make sure it’s on the page. We learn to gather and organise these so they draw the reader in.

Tip: Visit a coffee shop. Write down all the fascinating and mundane descriptive details. Fill a page or ten pages.  Find the ones that give a mental picture of the place. Choose just five sentences from your pages that give the best ‘snapshot’.

3. Take off the training wheels

Reading and studying about the craft of writing can teach us a lot – and writing is about learning and improving all the time. But ‘studying’ can also turn into a form or procrastination. We don’t get back to our stories and put (perfect) theory into (sometimes-clumsy) practice. 

We all have our own approaches to writing. No one can tell you how writing will work in your life and your career. This is something you have for figure out for yourself.  But as they say: ‘Learn the rules before you break them.’

Tip: Have a Journalist Day. Find the one event in your day – or even a friend’s day – and write a 300-word article, poem or mini-story about it. Give yourself a 5pm deadline. Keep it. Get in the habit to writing to a deadline. 

Making up stories is easy. Finding the language, structure and focus to shape your imagination into a novel, screenplay or short story is a lot of hard work".

Fonte:Writers Write

Os anjos também lêem / Angels read too

 E é pró menino e prá menina!

As mães leitoras de Mark Arian / Mothers reading by Mark Arian

Mark Arian

20 citações de William Zinsser sobre como escrever melhor / 20 Inspiring Quotes From William Zinsser's "On Writing Well"

20 Inspiring Quotes From William Zinsser's "On Writing Well" from Glenn Leibowitz

O livro é um portão / A book is a gate

O livro é o portão de acesso

à liberdade e ao saber.

E nem sequer cobra ingresso:

basta abri-lo, entrar… e ler!

Antônio Augusto de Assis

"Avoid cab drivers who are into spiritual self-help books"

Os livros e a depressão / Reading with depression

Adrian Gottlieb

Depois de ler sobre o modo como os livros ajudam a lidar com a depressão no meio de uma crise, eis uma nova perspectiva: depois da depressão, o que muda na leitura?

Reading, Depression, and Me

BY KELLY JENSEN

FEB 16, 2015

Last month, Rioter Amanda wrote about the challenges she had while trying to read during a bout with depression. The post resonated with me particularly hard and at a timely moment. Just days before, I went and got help for depression after years (and years and years) of believing that it was who I was and something that I could manage entirely on my own.

For long periods of my life, hitting low points meant turning to books, rather than turning away from them. I could sit down on a weekend and devour 4 or 5 novels in no time. Sinking into another world, one entirely outside of my head, meant getting away from the disease. I could disconnect from myself. I’ve always been a fan of dark realities, since so often, they’re well beyond any realm I could imagine in my own world. Whatever was causing me pain couldn’t hold a candle to the things I was seeing in fiction.

When you’re in a bad mental place, you reach for comfort wherever you can find it.

I put off getting help not just because I thought I could do it myself. I was also influenced by too-frequently-seen narratives in books — and other media — about mental illness. When you struggle with something like depression or anxiety or both, your brain isn’t functioning normally on any level. You really believe the terrible things your mind is telling you. Regular exposure to the message that seeking help, especially medication, is a sign of weakness and a means of numbing yourself to reality, sinks in. The last thing in the world I wanted as a writer and as a reader was to feel like the things that buoyed me through rough times would be the first things I’d lose when getting better.

After making the excruciatingly hard decision to medicate, I can’t say enough for what a positive difference this has made in my life. Especially my reading and writing life.

I’m enjoying — really, really enjoying — reading and talking about reading in a way that I never have before. It’s not a support system for me. Rather, it’s an engaging, fully-immersiveexperience that I am an active, present part of. I’m still turning to dark books but the way I feel about them is changed. I think I love them even more because I see my world in there.Because I am able to see what is and isn’t reality. I’m coming at stories with a better sense of who I am and what it is I believe, increasing my empathy for characters and choices they make.

There’s a sense of quiet in my head I’ve never had before. That quiet has given me the chance to concentrate and think critically in ways I’ve struggled with in the past. I’m not rushing from idea to idea; instead, I’m able to think through the actions and choices in a story and pluck more carefully and more thoroughly at the strings holding them together. My time with a book extends beyond what it’s bringing me at the moment — escape, comfort — and I’m more able and excited to grapple with ideas days later.

My reading and my writing have both slowed down. But it’s the kind of slowing down that feels good. There’s breathing room and thinking room, with no pressure to hurry up and get through so I can fill those spaces with more things. I’m taking part in enjoyable, richly rewarding activities that fuel and exercise my mind, not just turn it off.

Someone told me that there comes a grieving period when depression/anti-anxiety medication and/or therapy and/or other treatment starts to really work. It’s not grieving about losing who you are; it’s about how much you denied your past self. About how you didn’t give yourself the chance to function but listened to those painful messages your mind fed you.

Depression took me out of my reading life. Recognizing that — and getting help for it — has put me back in in ways I could never have imagined. Reading isn’t about powering through. It isn’t about disconnecting.

Reading is about being a part of something.

Fonte

A literacia é liberdade / Literacy means freedom

 

"For me, literacy means freedom. For the individual and for society".

LeVar Burton

Será "As 50 Sombras de Grey" um conto de fadas com algemas? / "'50 Shades' Is Just 'Beauty and the Beast' with Handcuffs and Sex Toys"

"At its most basic, Fifty Shades of Grey—like Twilight, and like so many bestsellers that have come before—appealed not just to suburban housewives, but to the little girls they had once been. The story is less a booster for bondage (such as Pauline Réage’s legendary erotica, Story of O) than a retelling of Beauty and the Beast. At the end of her saga, when all the whips have been sheathed and the harnesses have been unstrung, Anastasia Steele has tamed and wedded her beast, given birth to one of his children, and conceived another. In its final lines, the narrative appears less a celebration of sexual transgression than of the nuclear family".

Leia AQUI todo o artigo de Sarah Marshall.

Já AQUI falei do que achei sobre esta triologia que li na íntegra. Quanto ao filme, não me posso pronunciar porque ainda não vi. Mas tenho intenção de ver. 

O serão perfeito / The perfect evening

 

Anna Rose Bain

Mais 8 leitoras românticas de Vladimir Volegov / 8 romantic pictures of women reading by Vladimir Volegov

Vladimir Volegov

Preguiçosos! / Woman reading by Vladimir Volegov

Vladimir Volegov

"Todos querem voltar à natureza, mas ninguém quer ir a pé".

Karin Petra Kelly

Leitora em Dia de Namorados / Valentine's day reader

s. id.