"This," says Aristotle, "is the essence of the plot; the rest isepisode."

You have not graspeda complex unity if all you know about it is how it is one. Youmust also know how it is many, not a many that consists of alot of separate things, but an organized many. If the partswere not organically related, the whole that they composedwould not be one. Strictly speaking, there would be no wholeat all but merely a collection.

Youmust apprehend the unity with definiteness. There is only oneway to know that you have succeeded. You must be able totell yourself or anybody else what the unity is, and in a fewwords. ( If it requires too many words, you have not seen theunity but a multiplicity. ) Do not be satisfied with "feeling theunity" that you cannot express. The reader who says, "I knowwhat it is, but I just can't say it," probably does not even foolhimself.

RULE 2. STATE THE UNITY OF THE WHOLE BOOK

You become familiar with the process of catching an idea andtranslating that idea. You understand the tools and the lighting. Youunderstand the whole process—you’ve been through it before.

But it wasn’t always that way. When I made Dune, I didn’t havefinal cut. It was a huge, huge sadness, because I felt I had sold out,and on top of that, the film was a failure at the box office. If you dowhat you believe in and have a failure, that’s one thing: you can stilllive with yourself. But if you don’t, it’s like dying twice. It’s very, verypainful.

LYNCH: Well, for me, ideas—even a fragment—convey everything. In a spark you see images, youhear sounds, you feel a mood. And it becomescomplete, even if it is a fragment. The original ideacomes with a lot of power, and you have to keepchecking back all the way through the process tosee if you are being true to it.

YNCH: No. What happens is, when you getfragments, the whole is not revealed. It’s just thefragments. And then the fragments seem to want toarrange themselves. And a little bit further down theline you begin to see what is forming. And it’s asmuch a surprise to you as to anybody else.

LYNCH: I know we were doing that, but lookingback, it’s a magical process because you can’t tellwhere ideas come from, and it seems like it’s justboth of us focusing on something. And it was acouple of ideas that were fragments, and thosefragments focus you. And it seems that theyrelease a little lock on a door and the door opensand more fragments start coming in—drawn by thefirst fragments. It’s strange, because if any of youhave ever written anything, you know that one dayit’s not there and then a month later or two monthslater it’s there. And it’s two people tuning into thesame place, I think.

Fontane’s most basic modes of literary production have much incommon with this textual practice. Whether he was working on a travelreport, a historical essay, a book review, or a new novel, he followed aroutine of scouring, excerpting, and rearranging. He amassed largequantities of source material—culled mostly from circulatingnewspapers and journals, but also from letters, images, historicaldocuments, and monographs—in disconnected notebook entries andon loose folio sheets. He then surveyed these textual building blocks,outlined rearrangements with the help of lists, and combined them intoa new text. This pattern of production could be surprisingly mechanical.

Merchants and traders have a waste book (Sudelbuch, Klitterbuch in GermanI believe) in which they enter daily everything they purchase and sell,messily, without order. From this, it is transferred to their journal, whereeverything appears more systematic, and finally to a ledger, in double entryafter the Italian manner of bookkeeping, where one settles accounts witheach man, once as debtor and then as creditor. This deserves to be imitatedby scholars. First it should be entered in a book in which I record everythingas I see it or as it is given to me in my thoughts; then it may be enteredin another book in which the material is more separated and ordered, andthe ledger might then contain, in an ordered expression, the connectionsand explanations of the material that flow from it. [46]

I should perhaps also note that I try, whenever possible, not to collect raw quotes or information simply copied from the Internet or from books, but to write excerpts or summaries in my own words on the basis of my reading. Luhmann called this "reformulating writing" and argued that such an approach is most important for one's own intellectual life.

"State in your own words!" That suggests the best test we know for telling whether you have understood the proposition or propositions in the sentence.

I used to give oral examinations at St John's in Chicago and one of the one of the reasons why an oral examination is so much better than the written examination is the professor can never in a written examination say to the student what did you mean by these words 00:47:05 but in oral examination a student often repeats words he's read in the book and you're saying now Mr Jones what you just said is exactly what Hobbs said or what Darwin or 00:47:18 lock said now tell me in your own words what Locke or Hobbes or Darwin meant and then the student has remembered the words perfectly can't tell you in his own words no and you know he has he has noticed of the sentence right he's just 00:47:30 memorized or sometimes he actually can do it and then you say that's very good Mr Jones but now give me a concrete example of it yeah and he failed to do that guy those are the two tests I've always used to be sure the student really grasps the meaning of the key 00:47:42 sentence

It seems that the method is a direct equivalent of a.fdiv(b).ceil, and as such, annoyingly unnecessary, but fdiv, due to floating point imprecision, might produce surprising results in edge cases

As "module" is more generic concept than "class", the name misleadingly implies that either this method doesn't returns refined modules, or modules can't be refined. This is obviously not true and trivially disproved: module Refs refine Enumerable do def foo = puts 'foo' end end Refs.refinements[0].refined_class #=> Enumerable. Which is, well, not a class. # The refinement is usable, so it is not a mute concept: using Refs [1, 2, 3].foo # prints "foo" successfully I believe we refer to "modules" when some feature applies to modules and classes. Unless there is some deeper consideration for the current naming (I don't see justification in #12737, but I might miss something), the method should be renamed or aliased.

Amazon has become a marketplace for AI-produced tomes that are being passed off as having been written by humans, with travel books among the popular categories for fake work.

John McPhee — one the great American writers of nonfiction, almost peerless as a prose stylist — once wrote an essay for the New Yorker about his process called “Draft #4.” He explains that for him, draft #4 is the draft after the painstaking labor of creation is done, when all that’s left is to punch up the language, to replace shopworn words and phrases with stuff that sings.

Question: fiction and non-fiction .t3_164ob1y._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

you only have to solve a limited set of problems, and so you can write relatively fast.

If there’s no conflict, you’ll know it here and you should either add conflict or scrub the scene.

The first thing to do is to take that four-page synopsis and make a list of all the scenes that you’ll need to turn the story into a novel. And the easiest way to make that list is . . . with a spreadsheet.

Take as much time as you need to do this, because you’re just saving time downstream.

If you believe in the Three-Act structure, then the first disaster corresponds to the end of Act 1. The second disaster is the mid-point of Act 2. The third disaster is the end of Act 2, and forces Act 3 which wraps things up. It is OK to have the first disaster be caused by external circumstances, but I think that the second and third disasters should be caused by the protagonist’s attempts to “fix things”. Things just get worse and worse.

Good fiction doesn’t just happen, it is designed. You can do the design work before or after you write your novel.

In the end, I numbered and scanned 52,569 individual note cards from the Phyllis Diller gag file.

Diller says that she always let the audience do the editing of her material for her. If people didn't laugh, or get it right away, the joke didn't survive. "You never blame the audience," she says. Thus, her advice to aspiring comics: "Go out and try it, and if you find out from the audience that you're not funny, quit."

“I admire her ability for organization too. My jokes are still mostly in my head. She got hers on paper in alphabetical order.

I could continue a thread anywhere, rather than always picking it up at the end. I could sketch out where I expected things to go, with an outline, rather than keeping all the points I wanted to hit in my head as I wrote. If I got stuck on something, I could write about how I was stuck nested underneath whatever paragraph I was currently writing, but then collapse the meta-thoughts to be invisible later -- so the overall narrative doesn’t feel interrupted.

Quoting the academics Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, Pinker suggests approaching writing as if you were pointing something in the environment out to another person – something that she would notice for herself, if only she knew where to look. Imagine directing someone's gaze across a valley, to a specific house on the other side. "You should pretend," writes Pinker, "that you, the writer, see something in the world that's interesting, and that you're directing the attention of your reader to that thing." He calls this the "joint attention" strategy.

In the ensuing decades, mathematicians began working with this new thing, the category, and this new idea, equivalence. In so doing they created a revolutionary new approach to mathematics, category theory, that many see as supplanting set theory. Imagine if writers had spent 150 years representing the world only through basic description: This is a red ball. That is a 60-foot tree. This is a dog. Then one day someone discovers metaphor. Suddenly, our ability to find new ways to represent the world explodes, as does our knowledge of writing as a discipline.

Books aren’t something one approves or disapproves of; they are to be understood, interpreted, learned from, shocked by, argued with and enjoyed. Moreover, the evolution of literature and the other arts, their constant renewal over the centuries, has always been fueled by what is now censoriously labeled “cultural appropriation” but which is more properly described as “influence,” “inspiration” or “homage.” Poets, painters, novelists and other artists all borrow, distort and transform. That’s their job; that’s what they do.

In the West, the primary impact of the idea has been on literature rather than science: "stream of consciousness as a narrative mode" means writing in a way that attempts to portray the moment-to-moment thoughts and experiences of a character. This technique perhaps had its beginnings in the monologues of Shakespeare's plays and reached its fullest development in the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, although it has also been used by many other noted writers.[184]

Nowhere is the P&V distortion so plain and disturbing as in their versions of Tolstoy.Critics sometimes say it is impossible to ruin Tolstoy because his diction is so straightforward. But it is actually quite easy to misrepresent him if one does not understand the language of novels. Since Jane Austen, novels have tended to trace a character’s thoughts in the third person. The choice of words, and the way one thought begets another, belongs to the character, and so we come to know her inner voice. At the same time, the character’s view may not comport with the author’s, and it is the art of the writer to make clear that what the character is seeing is deluded or self-serving or foolish. This “double-voicing” lies at the heart of the 19th-century novelistic enterprise. For Dickens and Trollope, “double-voicing” becomes the vehicle of satire, while George Eliot and Tolstoy use it for masterful psychological exploration. If one misses what is going on, the whole point of a passage can be lost.

He takes banal people and puts them into banal situations, but he has hope for them.

But Tolstoy himself said the point is to get the thing said and then, if he wasn’t sure he had said it, he would say it again and again.”

“Hemingway read Garnett’s Dostoyevsky and he said it influenced him,” he continued. “But Hemingway was just as influenced by Constance Garnett as he was by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Garnett breaks things into simple sentences, she Hemingwayizes Dostoyevsky, if you see what I mean.”

How do you organize all of the things you read? My system is actually pretty simple, and it relies on organizing my regular reads, quick digesting and sorting one-off articles, and sometimes doing extensive note-taking with online apps.

As Chris Aldridge says, for centuries the Zettelkasten approach was the standard and universal method for producing books and articles - until personal computers took over.

Today, you either thrive on that word processor model or you don’t. I really don’t, which is why I’ve invested effort, as you have, in researching previous writing workflows, older than the all-conquering PC of the late 1980s and early 90s. At the same time, new writing tools are challenging the established Microsoft way, but in doing so are drawing attention to the fact that each app locks the user into a particular set of assumptions about the drafting and publishing process.

I always like to point to a text that changed my thinking about this question, and that’s Kathleen Yancey’s “Writing in the 21st Century.” It basically states that students are writing more than ever before. If you were to challenge a group of students (which I have) to document how many text messages, TikTok, IG posts, Facebook posts, tweets, emails they send out in a day, the sheer volume of writing is staggering. Why we don’t value that writing in academia is the question for me.

Each volume was bound andnumbered, and the set was titled whatwe had ended so many of our letters

a bundle of cards withwarm words as palpable as the straw-berry cream cake, for which I lusted

OVIDstill had some fangs,

If you haven’t read any of his novels, it’s safe to describe Palahniuk’s characters and stories as dirty. It’s dark humor and appropriately the descriptions of the smells are not heavenly. He doesn’t describe the nice smell of perfume, but instead “smell a hint of Chanel No. 5 perfume mixed with his BO.” It’s not enough to say a dirty bedroom smells, but that it has the same smell as “tennis shoes in September after he’s worn them all summer without socks .” Palahniuk doesn’t just settle at describing the scent of someone’s bad breath, but instead makes note that it “smelled like a burp after you’ve ate pork sausage for breakfast.”

framework for making claims with evidence. The simplest of which, which is what I use, is Claim-Evidence-Reasoning (CER). Students are taught to state their claim (The theme of the story is X), support it with evidence (Readers can infer this through the story's plot, particularly...), and explain their reasoning (Because the character's action result in X, ...) Another great framework is The Writing Revolution/The Hochman Method's "single paragraph outline". Students need to be taught that these are the units of thought -- the most basic forms of an argument. And, even before this, they need to know that a sentence is the form of an idea.

I've been using index cards for tracking reading notes (lit or bib notes now) and I want to change this topic of index cards over to the Z system. In the past, the main section was "writing" and two subsections, "nonfiction" and "fiction". They are all how-to. I have some main notes but most are from every writing book published which I've read in the last 10 years (yep, shelves full). Approx. 3000 index cards, maybe more, with lots of sub-subsection, etc. I've been teaching writing for the last 10+ years and would love to connect the dots easier now than I have in the past. On the list, I couldn't find the recommended category to place these under. Maybe productivity is in there somewhere. I'm working on a mind map structure now. Any thoughts or advice on this? Anyone else done this?

Meet Bard: your creative and helpful collaborator, here to supercharge your imagination, boost your productivity, and bring your ideas to life.

I wanted to try something very different. So, I use another writing system to write my original thoughts. I use the Wakandan writing system to write my thoughts because I already know how to write in it and I virtually know almost no one else who knows how to.

4/20/52[Keime.] Murder by mental nagging. Woman nags her husband to suicide, which he does so it looks like he has been murdered. Poison, which he puts in her desk drawer, her fingerprints on it.

July 7, 1942I want to take all my notebooks and read through them for important phrases — use them. It would be wonderful to do it on a weekend. Alone, in the quiet.

Even three or four words are often worth jotting down if they will evoke a thought, an idea or a mood. In the barren periods, one should browse through the notebooks. Some ideas may suddenly start to move. Two ideas may combine, perhaps because they were meant to combine in the first place. —Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

I highly recommend notebooks for writers, a small one if one has to be out on a job all day, a larger one if one has the luxury of staying at home.

The bee plunders the flowers here and there, but afterwards they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment — The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne

Tinderbox Meetup - Sunday, May 7, 2023 Video: Connect with Sönke Ahrens live, the author of How to Take Smart Notes

I’d rather challenge people to figure out a way to get their work to connect with what really means something to them, however they’re going to do it. It doesn’t always mean writing about what you know, but it means writing about something in a way that’s going to get you to use your best and most troubling material.

I was told to write poems that cost me something to write them. They cost me a lot. Too much? I’m still carrying ones and zeros on the budget. I go to poems looking for heart. You can tell when a poet has put a lot of heart into the poem and you can tell when they left it out. Some of them favor brain. But for me, all brain is no ache but headache.”

“You throw it all away and invent from what you know. I should have said that sooner. That’s all there is to writing.”

Write as if you were a movie camera. Get exactly what is there. All human beings see with astonishing accuracy, not that they can necessarily write it down.”

“You absolutely should write about what you know. There are all sorts of small things that you should store up and use, nothing is lost to a writer. You have to learn to stand outside of yourself. All experience, whether it is painful or whether it is happy is somehow stored up and sooner or later it’s used.”

“I just try to work on ideas that interest and perplex and absorb me. People say, “Write what you know,” but for me it’s more like, “Write what obsesses you.”

For me, it’s the difference between fiction that matters only to those who know the author and fiction that, well, matters.

I think what’s behind “write what you know” is emotion. Like, have you known happiness? Have you ever been truly sad? Have you ever longed for something? And that’s the point, if you’ve longed for an Atari 2600, as I did when I was twelve, all I wanted was that game console, if you have felt that deep longing, that can also be a deep longing for a lost love or for liberation of your country, or to reach Mars. That’s the idea: if you’ve known longing, then you can write longing. And that’s the knowing behind “write what you know.””

Sometimes you must surrender the idea of steering the story toward a predetermined structure and destination. We all know how to do the latter, so it feels secure.

Writing about science means humbling yourself about how little you know, and then writing the story in the authoritative voice of a tentative expert.

Roy Peter Clark, writing scholar and coach at The Poynter Institute, says, “Reports give readers information. Stories give readers experience.” I would add: An article is generic; a story is unique.

Roy Peter Clark, writing scholar and coach at The Poynter Institute, says, “Reports give readers information. Stories give readers experience.” I would add: An article is generic; a story is unique.

My teachers were practice, experience, trial and error, good editors and exemplars like John McPhee, Tracy Kidder, Edward Hoagland, Paul Theroux and Annie Dillard.

“I wrote 86 episodes of ‘The West Wing,’ and every single time I finished one, I’d be happy for five minutes before it just meant that I haven’t started the next one yet, and I never thought I would be able to write the next one. Ever.”

Sorkin had been a heavy smoker since high school — two packs a day of Merits — and the habit had long been inextricable from his writing process. “It was just part of it, the way a pen was part of it,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it too much, because I’ll start to salivate.”

In 1971, his reputation was beginning its ascent when he was interviewed by The Ohio Review. He described what he felt after completing a poem:Well, after the brief, and I think normal, period of exhilaration, there is a let-down. What I’ve done is written another poem. And what I have to do is write another one.

especially frightening was how hishair lay flat on his pale forehead

Ivan Ilyich sensed it, drovethe thought of it away, but it would go on, and it would come and standdirectly in front of him and look at him, and he would be durilbstruck,the light would go ?ut in his eyes, and he would again begin asking himself: - "Can it alone be true?"

As his wife became more irritable and demanding

His eyeswere tearful and such as are found in impure boys of thirteen or fourteen

noticing that the table was threatened with �sh

(generally the whole drawing room was filled withknickknacks and furniture)

snap.

在图书馆里翻来翻去写出来的东西，没什么意义，尤其在 ChatGPT 时代。以后一个初中生写的东西说不定比大牌作家写得还好，他收集资料的能力更强。所以，我的书要提供原创的实地的东西，ChatGPT 代替不了的东西。现在这本书可以说达到这个标准，我相信 ChatGPT 肯定写不出来。

How best to incorporate a book of terms? .t3_12e2r50._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } questionHi, so my Zettelkasten is mainly based around learning literary/storytelling techniques. There's a book called the Elements of Eloquence (which I can't recommend enough to those interested in language) which lays down a large number of formulas from rhetoric for creating memorable lines. It varies in complexity from alliteration to hendiadys, and contains 39 of these memorable-line-recipes in total.I want to enter them into my vault, but worry that creating 39 new notes for the individual formula might be overkill. I thought I'd ask here as I am worried about irreducibility - do I create a single note that contains brief descriptions of all the recipes, or fill my zettelkasten with them, creating what feels a little bit like spam?I've had the zettelkasten for a while but have been too busy to properly use it until recently, so I thought I'd be better off asking the people with actual experience!

Writing is rewarding. Writing is empowering. Writing is even fun. As human, we are wired to communicate. We are also wired for “play.” Under the right circumstances, writing allows us to do both of these things at the same time.

In a piece like this, writing is the expression and exploration of an idea (or collection of ideas). It is only through the writing that I can fully understand what I think.

one of the things I value about writing, is the act of writing itself. It is an embodied process that connects me to my own humanity, by putting me in touch with my mind, the same way a vigorous hike through the woods can put me in touch with my body.

Value the process, rather than the product.

I found the format of these Hypothes.is notes to be much more readable than the notes on the same topic in Evernote.

The earliest time of composition of any of these fragmentswas, so far as we can judge, 1929. The date at which the latestdatable fragment was written was August 1948. By far thegreatest number came from typescripts which were dictated from1945- 1948

More specificity is always preferable. It demonstrates to the college that you have given the programme careful consideration and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.

A plugin to help you collect working materials.