Ella Fitzgerald, What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?
Sufjan Stevens, Year of the Snake
Mazzy Star, Flowers in December
best wishes for the new year, everyone - hopefully 2013 will leave us all predominantly psychologically unscathed! just kidding! (to be honest i'm not).
if you’re anything like me and spent the duration of
NaNoWriMo procrastinating exam revision and then stressing over how little exam
revision you have done, i thoroughly suggest you take time out of any leave you may have been given off school/work/llama herding this festive season to do the very thing you put aside -the glorious art of writing!!!
of course, this is easier said than done and so out of the goodness of my heart i've assembled tips/rules/advice from accomplished writers whose work i enjoyin an effort to get you and i fired up with inspiration.
in 1946 George Orwell published an essay titled Politics and the English Language, in which he
argued that the worlds of politics and business purposefully express
themselves imprecisely as to avoid taking a side in any matter and as a result
offending numerous persons which would eventually lead to the cogs working in
their machines to render themselves default, leaving the business and political
worldsto collapse in on themselves. he
was just that anarchist, okay??? the author’s rules are brief, concise, and pithy and i am breaking rule #3 with this very sentence.
Zadie Smith is one of my favourite authors ever – her work
is fresh and witty and beautiful and every other positive adjective you can
think of. yeah i am a proud president of the (albeit; imaginary) Zadie Smith Fangirl Club. ((WHY HASN’T SHE PROPOSED TO ME YET???)) her rules show her natural flair for writing.
the article, an adaptation of a speech Eugenides gave to the
2012 recipients of the Whiting Award, is full of cold truths presented in the
author’s typical glowing and glittering poetic manner.
Jack Kerouac is like the middle ground between George Orwell and
Jeffrey Eugenides; the writing love child of starkness and mysticism. his beliefs about writing are more like tips.
my own itty bitty piece of advice for struggling
writersout there is the following:
listen to songs that are stories. they get your sense of a
story outline going and sometimes give you themes to toy with in your drafts (such as unrequited love, going against your parent’s wishes, etc.).
three of my favourite story songs:
Pulp, Disco 2000
Sonic Youth, Little Trouble Girl
Tom Milsom, About Our Universe
if you are one of those people that can’t stand listening to
lyrics when typing away, film soudtracks are the absolute best thing ever.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, In Motion (from The Social Network's OST)
Hans Zimmer, Mermaids (from the Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides OST)
Danny Elfman, Ice Dance (from the Edward Scissorhands OST)
“meanwhile, in the US, most people don’t even know that their own military just blew away three young Afghan children. the sad truth is, even if they did know, they wouldn’t really care. there’d be no outpouring onto the streets of people demanding a halt to the air attacks and the drone killings. only 28% of Americans say they object to America’s drone warfare, though it is clear that drone attacks are leading to the deaths of hundreds — perhaps thousands — of innocent civilians. according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, a survey of 20 countries about reactions to drone warfare found that in the US only 28 % of Americans said they disapproved of America’s drone warfare campaign. in countries that are normally America’s allies, like Britain, Germany and Japan, disapproval rates were 47%, 59% and 75% respectively. in the US, the survey found 62 % of Americans actively support drone warfare, giving America the distinction of being the only country surveyed in which a majority of the public supports killing by drone.
the attackers of the three schoolgirls in Pakistan, who have been arrested already, will almost certainly be imprisoned for their heinous crimes. not so the pilot and the targeting personnel who called in his deadly strike that led to the deaths of three Afghan children. they will come home from the war hailed as “heroes” by any Americans they meet. people will pass them and say, “thank you for your service” — even though that “service” includes killing little children. i leave it to readers to imagine how they think this impacts on the parents and relatives of the children who were killed by America’s “brave” military. i know though that if a foreign military blew my kids away with impunity and for nothing, they would in that moment create an enemy for life—and Liam Neeson’s character would have nothing on me in terms of my desire to exact vengeance, either. those befuddled Americans who are still asking, “why do they hate us?” should think about this a bit.”- Dave Lindorff, Children Under Attack
