Front or Blunt?

Restless.

[lydiamurtin]

“I realize I have a lot of amazing opportunities, but I don’t know how you can play a human being going through real human experiences without being able to walk down the street. If you can’t live a real life, how do you play a real person? It always confuses me when actors work back-to-back-to-back with no break. If you live your life on a film set, how the hell can you relate to real people? You don’t know what it’s like to not have people fussing over you all day, and that’s not life—that’s silly movies. I will always want to take breaks and I wouldn’t be OK with losing that.”

[yeahwrite]

I think writing is the same way. I know that we writers tend to be introverts, but I think we need to go out and interact with people in order to be able to write about them—we can’t just lock ourselves inside behind a computer. It also reminds me of how a writing professor in college told me I absolutely should not go straight from undergrad to an MFA; I needed to graduate and go be a poor 20-something so that I had something to write about. That’s why I don’t feel guilty when I take breaks from writing for a while—living life is just part of the research process.

[thegiftcurse-blog]

Say word. But you actually have to eventually get back to it.

[thegiftcurse-blog]

Have I already shared this? Ok, here it is again. (via https://soundcloud.com/officialantwon/jacuzzi-ft-lushlife-prod-by-lushlife?utm_source=soundcloud&utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=tumblr)

[createandnarrate]

What’s the best time of day to write?

I’m a night-writer myself. What about you?

[demonprincex]

The Real Problem of Evil is Thinking Evil's a Real Problem

The idea that people can be completely evil and have no redeeming qualities, extenuating circumstances, or core humanity at all … That is the only place where true evil lies. The belief that some people are “evil” makes it easier for us to write them off, dehumanize them, destroy them, cease helping them. The idea of evil makes misbegotten moral righteousness possible, and justifies all manner of aggressive and hateful acts.

Sociopathy and antisocial personality disorder are just a repackaging of the age-old concept of pure unredeemable evil. It’s morality-driven dehumanization dressed in a clinical psychologist’s coat.

It is comforting to believe that people commit heinous acts because they are henious monsterous people. Such thinking protects us from wondering if we are capable of committing evil acts, if we are hateful and destructive. It also implies that ending suffering in the world is not a matter of slowly and constant reforming all our hearts and minds; it’s simply a matter of finding all the bad eggs and scrambling them.

The concept of sociopathic evil absolves us from doing the hard work of reforming criminals, remedying the precursors to crime, and examining the morality of our own actions. It is much easier to cast off the malicious as evil, disordered, defective, inhuman, exceptional, than it is to turn such a critical gaze upon ourselves.

By accepting the idea that “some people are just evil”, we resign ourselves to an overly simplified worldview where wrongs cannot be prevented, only punished, and where there is no broader societal responsibility for the sins of society’s children.

[yeahwrite]

^This is excellent information to keep in mind when writing antagonists/villains.

[thegiftcurse-blog]

Whoa.

[justadifferentbreed]

[thegiftcurse-blog]

#famousquotes #fyodordostoevsky

[thegiftcurse-blog]

#sylviaplath #famousquotes

[austinkleon]

Florian Illes, 1913: The Year Before The Storm

A very interesting month-by-month history of the year 1913. From the book’s description: 

It was the year Henry Ford first put a conveyer belt in his car factory, and the year Louis Armstrong first picked up a trumpet. It was the year Charlie Chaplin signed his first movie contract, and Coco Chanel and Prada opened their first dress shops. It was the year Proust began his opus, Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring, and the first Armory Show in New York introduced the world to Picasso and the world of abstract art. It was the year the recreational drug now known as ecstasy was invented….It was 1913, the year before the world plunged into the catastrophic darkness of World War I.

It fit in really nicely with a few of the other books I’ve read this year — its jump-cut type style reminds me of Hip Hop Family Tree and the soap opera-like tales of Rilke’s douchery reminded me a lot of David Markson’s books.

Thanks to @theunread for the recommendation!

Filed under: my reading year 2015

[thegiftcurse-blog]

When in doubt, do it Haruki Murakami style.

[thegiftcurse-blog]

making art on a smartphone

"A lot of people don’t understand how I could have written this story, or any story, or anything at all, on my phone. The phone is cumbersome and represents , in the life of the mind best exemplified by the writing of short stories, pretty much everything that’s soulless and antagonistic. There’s the prevailing notion that if a story (or a novel) can be written on a phone, it must not have been very hard to write, and so it can’t possibly merit the attentions of the reader. Some people are threatened by it, because the written story is already no competition for the smartphone, which makes the smartphone the unintegratable enemy; and if just anyone can use the phone to doodle away, how far are we from the elevation of texts and tweets into high literature? That would be a galling attack on a conservative tradition. But I did use my phone to write this story, which means I sat hunched over its torture screen and tiny little keyboard for however long it took — two or three weeks of steady work — and when I was done I had the knotted shoulder, the crimped neck, and the carpel tunnel to prove it. Writing fiction on the phone, compared to the tranquility of computer-composing or the gentlemanly custom of pen and paper, is a full-contact blood sport. Why do I write under these conditions? Do I not have a desk, and a comfortable chair to sit in, and several empty notebooks waiting? I must like the pain. I must find it fitting. But the real answer is this: I wish I could tell you. I wish I could tell you why I write at all."

-Joshua Ferris, From The Best American Short Stories 2014 Contributors’ Notes

[rabidfletcherwriting]

How to keep moving forward...

… even when your brain hates you.

If you’ve been around here long, or if you know me in person, you probably know I have a slightly defective brain, which is to say that I have a history with clinical depression. Add on to that a(n…

[thegiftcurse-blog]

Speak.

[sizvideos]

Simply Delicious Shower Thoughts with Cookie Monster

Video - Via Siz iOS app

[cosmic-noir]

Why did you do this to me?

[bi-nightmare]

cookie monster why

[mentalismcentral-blog]

[gape-the-eternal-deactivated201]

faith

[glitter-and-crushed-skulls]

no

[samandriel]

come on natural selection don’t let us down

[newstatesman-blog-deactivated20]

In fact, the opposite is the case. You can’t read a short story properly online. Every word counts. You can’t drift. You have to surrender to “a beginning, a middle and end” that takes you “across the universe and back”, as Gaiman puts it. For all his joy in the tumble of Twitter and Google, these stories also express his ability to do the obverse – to switch off and concentrate. They demand all of your attention, something that our one-click world cries out to you never to give. So, to read a short story is a countercultural act, a little rebellion. The genre is at its best when it deals with discomfort, with feelings and people you don’t want to think about: the gaze in the street that you try to avoid, the noise in the night you pretend not to hear. That’s why it’s important – more so now than ever.

Frank Cottrell Boyce on the stop-what-you’re-doing-and-read power of neil-gaiman's new collection of short stories, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances. (via newstatesman)

[thegiftcurse-blog]

David Carr Found Me

What an ex-journalist junkie learned from an ex-junkie journalist

[thegiftcurse-blog]

To Invigorate Literary Mind, Start Moving Literary Feet

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body; the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms. Ideally, the runner who's a writer is running through the land- and cityscapes of her fiction, like a ghost in a real setting. There must be some analogue between running and dreaming. The dreaming mind is usually bodiless, has peculiar powers of locomotion and, in my experience at least, often runs or glides or ''flies'' along the ground or in the air. (Leaving aside the blunt, deflating theory that dreams are merely compensatory: you fly in sleep because in life you crawl, barely; you're soaring above others in sleep because in life others soar above you.)

[thegiftcurse-blog]

He had a tendency to accelerate when he read— evidence, I think, that he was sure of what he had written, that though the sentences were often long and full of all sorts of Faulknerian qualifiers and subordination, he had wrangled his ideas from the bush and captured them, for us, with words that best showed their plumage. I mean to say that, contrary to some perceptions, he was easy to follow.

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/memories-of-david-foster-wallace