I know lots of people have decided that now that they’re older, wiser and less angry with the world they’re over Brett Easton Ellis, and that his books, particularly his debut Less Than Zero and the callously excessive American Psycho , are just nasty, bitter and full of the kind of dead-eyed loathing that the world doesn’t need right now. But I’m not one of them. I think he does what he does exceptionally well, and that in a digital age his cold, detached cruelty is perhaps more resonant than ever. Just saying.
Tag Archive for 'Writing'
As previously mentioned, I like quotes. It’s as if I think that by merely knowing what someone intelligent said, I will become just as intelligent as they. Only I’m not intelligent enough to remember any of the things that they actually said, which is why I have to write them down. Here are my most recent finds, the majority of which I’ve lifted from the brilliant @ommwriter’s twitter stream (for ‘majority’ read ‘all’) – I suggested they make a page of them ages ago, they haven’t yet, so I’ve made my own.
Some are funny. Some are true. Some are familiar – although who remembers who first said “Less is more”? Really? Liar. Some are inspiring, but I left most of those out because most ‘inspiring’ things make me cringe. All entertained me though. Lookout for the one by Truman Capote, whose way with words was almost as inspired his taste in home furnishings (see above). The one from Popular Mechanics is also very insightful.
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci
“What’s the sense of living if you’re not learning.” – Chiquira Carrasca
“Less is more.” – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” – Maria Robinson
“Music is love in search of a word.” – Sidney Lanier
“Imagine more. Think less.” – unknown
“Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow…” – Lawrence Clark Powell
“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” – E. L. Doctorow
“Writing is both mask and unveiling.” – E.B. White
“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” – Edwin Schlossberg
“Writing well means never having to say, ‘I guess you had to be there.’” – Jef Mallett
“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” – Popular Mechanics, 1949
“The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.” – Richard Harding Davis
“Nighttime is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.” – Catherine O’Hara
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” -Ernest Hemingway
“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” – Tom Clancy
“A dose of poison can do its work only once, but a bad book can go on poisoning people’s minds for any length of time.” – Stud Terkel
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us” – Franz Kafka
“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” – Elmore Leonard
“The human mind is like umbrella. It functions best when open.” – Max Gropius
“Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.” – Noam Chomsky
“Some stories are true that never happened.” – Elie Weisel
“I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.” – Henri Matisse
“It [creativity] is like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” – Doctorow
“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” – Thomas Mann
“It’s a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.” – Andrew Jackson
“There is no method except to be very intelligent.” – T. S. Eliot
“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit-detector.” – Ernest Hemingway
“Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.” – Truman Capote
“I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.” – Cormac McCart
“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.”- Nadine Gordimer
“If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.” – Kingsley Amis
“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” – Isaac Asimov
“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean” – Robert Louis Stevenson
“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” – Douglas Adams
“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” – Albert Camus
“Other people’s interruptions of your work are relatively insignificant compared with the countless times you interrupt yourself.” – B. Francis
“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” – Cyril Connolly
I’m a big fan of Chuck ‘Fight Club’ Palahniuk’s writing. I’m an even bigger fan of his warped world view. And I’m an even bigger fan of the way he’s created this whole cult movement around the first two. I would love to go to one of Chuck’s readings, but until he makes it to London I’ll have to make do with the film above.
Writing isn’t hard. It’s concentrating long enough to type a whole sentence that’s the real bugger. Which is why OmmWriter is one of the best inventions of all time. As they say, Your mind is a wild monkey, and this simple little piece of software is just the thing to tame it. Download it now (if you’re on a mac that is) you won’t regret it.
There is an advert that pops up every so often over there on the right hand side. It may or may not be there now. Have a look. It’s one of these google ads that is generated according to surrounding content. It features a picture of a very smiley bald man with a laptop (or sometimes an equally delirious lady with lovely long hair and a laptop) and above his head it cheerily reads: Why not be a writer?
I think the same thing every time I see it.
BECAUSE IT HURTS AND MAKES ME WANT TO BREAK THINGS.
Just saying.
I am a big user of Moleskine note books. I have way too many of them. I will no doubt have way too many more. The pictures above are from an imaginary ad campaign that Amy Nortman, a student of the University of North Texas, won a competition with. What competition? I have no idea. But they are genius and ably explain the love of the Moleskine, so I hope it was a competition with a big fat cheque at the end of it.
See these and the rest of the series in their full glory on the Moleskine Flickr. To find your own deep love and spend more money than is reasonable on notebooks, see the Moleskine site.
I have ghosted celebrity memoirs. I have worked on biographies. I am currently two thirds of the way through writing a novel, plotting another and working on a film idea.
I used to do all of the above in Word. It used to to make me very unhappy.
I used to have folders all over my laptop with notes, research, transcripts, chapters, outlines, drafts, manuscripts. It was all very confusing. When the draft was finished I used to have to cut’n'paste each chapter into yet another Word document. Making sure there was a page break before each chapter was a nightmare. Keeping the formatting consistent made me want to kill. And if I wanted to change or move anything… I used to weep…a lot.
Not anymore. Oh no. Now I use Scivener. Now I have all my notes, research, transcripts, chapters, outlines and drafts in one place and when all the chapters are done I can compile them into a manuscript and output it to Word, page breaks and formatting included, at the touch of a button.
Am I happier? Of course. Would I recommend other writers try Scrivener for themselves? Absolutely. Am I more productive? Not a bit, but I at least get to procrastinate and be unproductive free from the fear of page breaks and formatting and not being able to find my notes the one time I do decide to write something. Which in its own way is worth every cent of the $39.95 it costs.
Don’t believe me? Why would you. Maybe the video below will do a better job of convincing you.
Elmore Leonard knows so much about writing he could write a book about it... or at least a list.
I never wanted to be one of those writers who ends up writing endlessly about writing but never seems to do any actual writing. Then again I never wanted to be one of those writers who spent hours on the internet reading other writers’ writing about writing instead of actually doing any writing, but I do a hell of a lot of that and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t found it a most enjoyable and educational way to avoid writing. So, by way of a compromise, here are some links to some brilliant writers talking about their brilliant writing.
Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s now legendary ‘10 Rules Of Writing’, The Guardian ran a two part feature where the likes of Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Philip Pullman, Ian Rankin, Will Self, Sarah Waters and Zadie Smith divulge the 10 rules which either make them the writer they are or stop them wanting to self-harm. Some tips are more technical than others, but all are informative, entertaining and worth reading. My particular favourites are Richard Ford’s: “Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea” and Roddy Doyle’s very wise opener: “Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.”
New meaning to the phrase ‘the film of the book’. And the best bit, it really does make you want to buy it. Or maybe it’s just me.
I love magazines. I should do. I’ve spent most of my adult life writing for them. Increasingly though, magazines are becoming hard to like, let alone love. Grown bloated on d-list celebrities, fad diets, watches, cars, tits, cellulite, empty sound bites and hot air, they’re just another noisy distraction designed to entertain the shortest of attention spans. Of course, you could say that for something more substantial there are always books, and as someone who writes those too I certainly wouldn’t argue with their value. But it’s not the same. Books are about words sparking the imagination; a writer and a reader, alone in a space sharing a thought. Magazines are about words and pictures and how the two interact. They’re about a designer’s interpretation of an attitude, a photographer’s understanding of a subject, a writer’s assessment of the situation and an art director’s idea of how all three can best come alive on the page. Or at least that’s the way I think of them – exciting explosions of ideas, unexpected stories that grab the attention and suck you in.
The truth is that mainstream consumer magazines aren’t like that anymore. And it’s a recent change. In the last 10 years word counts have plummeted, the pictures are bigger (although, sadly, not better) and the imagination, the vocabulary and the subject choice have become so constrained that it’s hard to tell one men’s magazine from the next and all the celeb gossip weeklies from each other. I could blame Loaded or Heat or everyone else who’s helped cheapen the format, but the real point is not to blame others but to do something about it – which is why I’m currently trying to get a cool, quality, pop culture quarterly off the ground. More of that in another post.
Away from the mainstream though, the magazine is very much alive and well and lovable. Independent publishers are doing all the things which used to make me buy magazines by the armful. They’re spilling imagination all over the page, exciting with indescribably sexy images and delivering rock’n'roll in print, and making all of it so exciting you could just reach in and touch it.
I know this because I recently bought two amazing books. We Love Magazines
Both books are beautifully executed with the same imagination and attitude as the titles they’re examining, so while bloody expensive, they’re worth every penny. It’s enough to make you want to put pen to paper and start dreaming up your very own super cool title… oh, wait a minute…
I am now officially to be found on RocksBackpages.com.
For those who don’t know RocksBackpages.com is the biggest and most prestigious archieve of music journalism to be found anywhere on the internet. Which means that I’m now sharing server space with some of the finest words from the likes of Lester Bangs, Nick Kent, Danny Baker, Felix Dennis, Nick Logan, Nick Hornby, Neil Tennant – yes, that Neil Tennant – Toby Young, Will Self, John Robb, Charles Shaar Murray, Andrew Mueller, Stuart Maconie, Dorian Lynskey, Paul Morley, Steven ‘Swells’ Wells, Phil Sutcliffe, Paolo Hewitt and saucy Loyd Grossman. Distinguished company I’m sure you’ll agree, although I like to think I hold my own.
Over the coming months my features, interviews and reviews will be added to the RocksBackpages.com library, making it the most exhaustive record of my journalism online and as if that wasn’t reason enough to pay the site a visit and sign-up for a reasonably priced subscription, I’ll also be posting witty, insightful and well argued music related pieces on my RocksBackpages.com writer’s blog – or more likely rambling semi-coherently about the twin and not completley incompatible joys of pop and downtempom cinematic jazz.
How could you even think of missing it?
DJing. It’s just playing records. No it is. Alright, you’ve got to have taste. And some records. And as with everything in life there are those who are really good at it and then there’s Peaches Geldof. But as Amy Kellner points out in her stupidly funny Vice Magazine piece about her life as a party DJ, it’s ‘the biggest fucking bullshit con of all time!’.
The results are in for the Story140 contest on Twitter, organised by Twitter micro-novelist Nick Warren, and I’m suitably pleased to announce that I came joint second, out of 20, with @mikebreed. Apparently were both just two votes behind the winner, @leeporter. To read Lee’s winning story, which I bagged as the winner as soon as I read it, and all the other 140 character stories click here.
I wrote 10 stories for the competition, before choosing this one as my entry:
“Small skinny decaf latté?” repeated the girl behind the counter. Samantha nodded. “Small skinny decaf latté? Do you even like coffee?”
The other nine were…
They told her that he’d been killed instantaneously. What did they know. She’d gone to great lengths to ensure he hadn’t.
The carpark was empty. He heard the footsteps behind him, but as usual, when he turned, there was no one. Always the same disappointment.
The barman poured him another drink, ‘on the house’. “Thanks,” he said. “Hey Dirk, old buddy, anytime.” Who Dirk was he had no idea.
The lift doors closed. He had 4 floors to decide, but knew it wasn’t enough. The deli counter was a minefield for the indecisive executive.
The newsreader stumbled, then broke into a sweat. He wasn’t sure, but he might just have called the Prime Minister Darling.
Every word, every character was beautifully crafted. Now all that was missing was the one thing which had eluded him all his life, a point.
“But I like money,” said Andrews, confused by the suggestion that there’s more to life. “I mean, you can’t eat spirituality.”
“To solve teen pregnancy we must instil in the young a sense of ambition,” the politician said. The student nodded, “Like wanting a PS3?”
Divorce wasn’t an option. Too expensive, too messy, too depressing. But sudden, violent death? It had its benefits. Like keeping the car.
I’ve been invited to write a 140 character story for the Story 140 competition being run by Twitter’s very own micro-novelist Nick Warren. A daunting task. If you haven’t read any of Nick’s stories on Twitter I suggest you stop reading this and go and follow him now. The drama, intrigue and humour he can find in 140 characters (including spaces) is staggering. My particular favourite being his story of Jan 19 2009, the eve of President Obama’s inauguration:
Welcome Mr President, we’ve been looking forward to meeting you. Agent Owen and I are with Alien Liaison sir, perhaps you’d better sit down.
Don’t know if I can match Nick’s pithy prose – as he puts it, a novel is a marriage, a short story an affair, the twitter story is a kiss – but I’m having a damn good go. Have written 10 possible contenders so far. I can only enter one, not sure how I’m going to pick, but so the other nine don’t go to waste, I’ll post them here after Nick has announced the winner of the competition.
Ah, the eternal question: What is cool?
Always followed by: And why have some people/places/things got it while others haven’t?
Are cool and style the same thing?
Are all stylish things cool?
Does something have to be fashionable to be cool? Or is cool about doing your own thing?
Is cool the same as the other indefinable quality we call x-factor? Or can you have that special star something and still be naff?
Is cool passion, authenticity, confidence, lack of effort or all of the above?
How do you know when you’ve got it? How do you know when it’s gone?
Is it something you’re born with?
Can you acquire it?
Can you buy it?
Can you sell it?
Is it something you can learn to be or does trying result in instant disqualification?
What’s your definition of cool?
Would it be the same as mine?
If it really is indefinable, then how come we all seem to know that those pictured above – Barack Obama, Steve McQueen, Apple’s iPhone, New York, Philippe Stark’s Juicer, Keith Richards, Miles Davis, James Dean, Adidas Shell Toes – all have it. Or maybe you don’t agree that they do.
How important is it anyway?
All my life I’ve been fascinated by the concept of ‘cool’, something you can’t see or touch yet we all instantly recognise, and react favourably to. Cool people/places/things are always popular, always respected, usually successful, invariably admired. Why? What have they got? What do they know? Can they themselves define it?
That’s what I’m intending to find out with The Definition Of Cool, my own personal journey in search of that magic formula. But first I need your help. I need to know your definition of cool. Who are the people, places and things that you think have it? And how would you put it into words? Don’t be too clever. I’m trying to get together a solid cast of characters I can go and interview – or in the case of products, places and dead people, those who know/knew them well. So don’t be afraid to be too obvious – obscure may be cool, but for our purposes it won’t get us very far. Pick people, places and things which are widely known and recognised, and tell me why you think they’re cool, along with your own definition, in the comments. Once I’ve got a sufficiently cool long list, I’ll be running a series of polls here on the blog to narrow it down to a short list of interviews for the book so don’t forget to sign-up to the mailing list here or subscribe to the RSS feed here, so you won’t miss your chance to vote.
In an effort to make things look cheerier (and prove that I really am a journalist) I’ve added page scans to all the articles in the journalism section. You’re welcome.
The Eames Lounger & Ottoman. Charles & Ray Eames at their best, although with so many stunning creations to their name, it’s a tough call. Don’t believe me, look here.
The coolest film posters by the greatest graphic designer of the 20th century. Find out more about Saul Bass’s life and work here and here.
I’m in love with my shiny new MacBook Pro.
It’s my 5th Apple laptop. My first was a little grey scale PowerBook 150. The internet was a new invention, colour was way out of my price range and the trackball was quite possibly the most exciting thing I’d ever seen in my life. My last Apple laptop was the last PowerBook G4. And when I say last, I mean last. I ordered it online via the Apple Store first week of Jan 2006. Second week of Jan 2006 Apple launched the MacBook Pro. Gutted doesn’t quite cover it. It took a little under two weeks to arrive. By the time it did it was already obsolete. As laptops go it was alright, but it didn’t have the new Intel CoreDuo chip, it was bulky and from the off I knew it wasn’t going to be a classic. My new MacBook Pro on the other hand, this is vintage Apple. In years to come I’ll look back in that misty way I do when I think about my little 150 with its golf ball sized trackball.
I am, totally in love.
