Category Archives for The Craft
How to Use a Rubber Duck to Beat Writer’s Block
It’s writer’s block: the moment you run into a mental wall while writing and can’t think of a good idea or a way to continue your story, paragraph, or even a single sentence. All creatives run into this problem at some point. Most run into it rather frequently. Sometimes it gets so bad that people give up on their creative pursuits entirely.
Thankfully, there’s a solution to the problem. It’s well-known in computer programming circles, but writers can use it, too: Talk to a rubber duck.
What I Learned About Writing From Reading Stephen King
My senior year of high school, I left my English teacher’s Christmas Party with Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot in my hands and an exciting new strain of the flu setting up shop somewhere in my respiratory system.
As a game (and our winter break reading assignment), we each wrote the title of our favorite book on a scrap of paper and placed it in a bowl, and then we passed the bowl around. It was literary roulette. And now, thanks to a sick classmate, I was about to spend my winter break reading.
Throughout that feverish Christmas holiday, I walked my first lap in the multiverse that would eventually introduce me to thinnies, low men, twinners, ka and ka-tet, and the Twelve Guardians of the Beams—in other words, the wonky fantasy lexicon that has contributed to some readers calling King a master of literature, and others a peddler of low art.
King is a divisive author. Some hang on his every word, while others fall in league with a more critical crowd. “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days in polite society are numbered,” King wrote in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
The Power of Pen and Paper: Should You Do More of Your Writing By Hand?
I spend most of my workday at the computer (and a fair amount of my leisure time on a tablet or phone). I expect the same might be true for you, too.
It hasn’t always been this way. As a young teen, I wrote a lot by hand. All my schoolwork was done in exercise books or on paper, with an occasional typed-up assignment. But gradually, I started writing more and more straight onto the computer.
These days, far more of my words are typed than handwritten. But when I put pen to paper, there’s something different about my writing and even my thinking. I’m able to take risks and be more vulnerable—because I know I won’t be publishing the words as written. I also find that I can focus more deeply, without all the distractions of the web a single click away.
7 Interesting Greek Words and How to Use Them in Your Writing
If a native English speaker was asked to name seven Greek words, “It’s all Greek to me” would perhaps be a tongue-in-cheek response. And yet the English language is replete with loanwords—that is, words adopted from another language with little to no modification—from Greek.
Perhaps the man who most famously demonstrated this was Xenophon Zolotas, a Greek economist known for his two speeches at the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development in the late 1950s. As the story goes, Zolotas spoke in Greek, yet he was understood by his English-speaking audience.Continue reading