Many writers hate the question from non-writers, “Where do you get your ideas?” I suspect one reason they hate it* is that they themselves don’t really know, but wish they did — so they could return to the well again, and again, and again…
No such luck in the real world, of course. Some story ideas [...]

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[Looking back through this post, I see that I've used the word "you" a lot in passages manifestly instructional or outright didactic, especially the last section -- as though barking orders at
you, the reader. Not so: it's just me, talking to myself.]
Moonrat, God bless ‘er, last week resurrected the Write Your A** Off idea [...]

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You probably already know the movie A Christmas Story, released in 1983 and based on the stories (and featuring the voiceover narration) of Jean Shepherd.
And if you’ve been hanging around here for a while, you may also know of my own childhood Christmas memories — and if so, you’ll know I share what seems to [...]

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From Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig:
You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
From “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a story by Jorge Luis Borges (translation by James E. Irby):
[Menard] did not want to compose another Quixote [...]

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It won’t come as news to anybody that blogs — all the “citizen journalist” talk notwithstanding — aren’t where you typically find news. They’re where you find feelings: reactions to news, sure, but also just general reactions to family and work situations, reactions to human behavior, reactions of self-approval and -disillusion, and so on.
Somebody finally [...]

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I once read advice from a… novelist? playwright? not sure — anyhow, someone who said something like, “The hardest job in writing a story is getting a character from one room to another.” This stuck in my head because at the time I was struggling with just this difficulty. I kept trying to account for [...]

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In a side conversation on a recent post here, my pseudonymous occasional correspondent known as “Froog” recently undertook some research for me. I’d come across this extremely cool wallpaper (well, I think it’s cool; that’s it at the right, and you can click the image to see a larger version); alas, I knew nothing about [...]

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In 1990, having finished the first (the blitz) draft of Crossed Wires — during whose composition I read mysteries almost exclusively — I stopped at a bookstore in South Jersey, hungry for something to read. My appetite of the moment was for a book, any book, which I’d been curious about for years but had [...]

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[This borders on "for geeks only" territory. But I think it's worth at least some attention if you aspire to get -- and keep -- a reading audience for your words on the Web.]
A highly respected site for Web-site designers, typographers, and so on, is called A List Apart. It’s been around for years, freely [...]

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[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with long histories. Part 1 -- on the song itself as finally recorded by numerous artists -- appeared on Tuesday.]
Hoagy Carmichael published “I Get Along Without You Very Well” in 1938. (The copyright date was November 18.) But the song’s history stretched back over 15 [...]

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