Absolutely Genuine Abraham Lincoln Quotes

The above was brought to you by Abraham Lincoln,
America’s first “selfie” President!

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All joking aside, if you want to read what Lincoln really said and wrote visit the website of The Abraham Lincoln Association which offers The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln as a free, online searchable database.

Also, why Lincoln? Why has he become such a popular figure in the Internet age? He’s become associated with everything from vampire stories to legos to medical bandages. Yes, bandages! And why have no other US Presidents been given the same treatment or garnered a similar widespread appeal? I believe it’s because his family lineage has died out. He has no family members left to protest these uses.

Develop a Story Idea from Scratch

“Ciabatta after first rise” by Rebecca Siegel

I love some of Jordan Dane’s posts. This one is a keeper.

5 Key Steps to Develop a Story from Scratch
https://killzoneblog.com/2015/09/5-key-steps-to-develop-a-story-from-scratch.html

Here are some choice quotes:

1. Imagine basic ‘what ifs” about a potential character (a storyteller) and a problem
2. Next, whose story will it be?
3. What is the external conflict between the main players (villain or adversary included)?
4. What’s at stake & how will the stakes escalate and play out?
5. Now draft your “pitch” or a premise.

Jordan Dane’s unpacked explanations offer real insight on this thorny process which is really the whole process of writing in microcosm. And that’s good advice you can take to the bank.

A good premise should:

• Be concise
• Be evocative
• Be framed from a “what if” question
• Be written in present tense with an easily understood sentence structure that makes the story seem familiar yet with a hook or difference to stand out from other books.
• It should contain a character, a conflict, and a hook.
• It should have universal appeal
• Be limited in word count (maybe up to 35 words or less, or 2-3 concise sentences)
• The core story should be centered on an idea that jumps out at anyone.

I recommend reading the entire article and applying it to a future work-in-progress.

Short Synopsis Formula

“Library books” by faungg’s photos

Guest-blogger Mike Wells posted a really clear explanation of what makes a compelling synopsis the other day on The Kill Zone blog.

The five elements are: a (1) hero who finds himself stuck in a (2) situation from which he wants to free himself by achieving a (3) goal. However, there is a (4) villain who wants to stop him from this, and if he’s successful, will cause the hero to experience a (5) disaster.

Head on over to https://killzoneblog.com/2015/09/a-secret-formula-for-creating-a-short-synopsis.html to read the post in its entirety.

How to Make a Book Safe

The site is http://www.howtomakeabooksafe.com/ and it’s self-explanatory. Go and check it out. It has very clear instructions with great illustrations and tips for avoiding common mistakes.

IMDB’s Movie Keyword Analyzer (MoKA)

Sorry for the lack of content over the past six months or so. I’ve been both very busy with my day job AND very uninspired in my writing. But all of that is changing. Here’s my second post of 2014:

I recently discovered that IMDb, the Internet Movie DataBase, has an incredible collection of keywords tagging the movies in their database.

How can a writer use this?

• To predict the popularity of what they are writing.
• To choose between potential plot points.
• and most certainly many more…

Visit: http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Keywords/ for the MoKA home page. If you scroll down, there are lists of all the keywords broken down by starting letter, keyword length (!), and tag count.

I think the list of keywords tagged on 10,000 or more movies is quite revealing:

• Death (11,357)
• Family Relationships (10,721)
• Father Son Relationship (12,334)
• Female Nudity (14,770)
• Husband Wife Relationship (10,371)
• Love (13,509)
• Murder (20,994)
• Sex (13,022)

So there we have it. There have been more movies about Murder and Death, Family Relationships, and Love and Sex than on any other topics.

So should we all be writing murder-death-kill thrillers about families involved in complicated love quadrangles featuring kinky sex scenes?

Of course not.

Write what you know. Write what you love. Write what you would enjoy reading. This is only one measure of success. But a writer should always use multiple metrics because past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Charles Goodhart put it another way: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. 

So we must use IMDb’s MoKA appropriately. It is interesting information, but it is an indicator, a measure, a metric, and not your writing goal. It is a tool best used to hone existing material. If used prescriptively when creating material, you will have relied on it too much and the quality and direction of your writing will likely suffer.

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Note: I removed the following non-plot keywords from the list above:

• Based On Novel (29,833)
• Based On Play (13,908)
• Character Name In Title (42,430)
• Independent Film (35,628)
• Number In Title (13,716)
• TV Mini-Series (10,145)

Albert Einstein on Intelligence

2013 in Review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 100,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Batman Unmasked: The Psychology of The Dark Knight

Time is precious to me. I don’t like it when other people recommend something that causes me to waste my time. That’s one reason why I don’t post regularly or recommend many things on this blog but this video is exceptional. It is utterly incredible. It’s 46 minutes long, but if you want to write psychologically rich characters, then it is absolutely worth every second of your time. You might even have to watch it a second time (like me).

How to be Highly Productive: The Science of High Performance

Source: What can we learn from the science of high performance? via Farnam Street

An amazing list composed of only 5 items:

1. Routines

In his book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, Roy Baumeister contends that the most successful people don’t make better decisions because of their willpower. Rather, they develop routines.

These routines reduce the number of decisions we need to make (as well as reducing stress). Thus it becomes easier to use your limited resources of self-control to avoid, rather than solve, crises.

2. Focus

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. – Herbert Simon

3. Practice

If we want to perform better beyond some basic competence researchers say we must engage in deliberate practice. These are designed, mindful efforts, to master even the smallest detail of success. To get better you have to get out of the autonomous stage.

4. Exercise

Just about every mental test possible was tried. No matter how it was measured, the answer was consistently yes: A lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary. Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in tests that measure long-term memory, reasoning, attention, problem-solving, even so-called fluid-intelligence tasks.

5. Rest

Taking time to rest won’t make you a slacker. While the corporate culture of “back-to-back” meetings from 9-5 may seem “cool” it is actually crazy. Rest is a critical component of creating and sustaining excellence.

Read the whole article. I’ve perused a lot of self-help lists aimed at making people more productive. This is clearly the best I’ve found and each of the items (excluding #5) is backed by research into what makes people productive.

Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing

1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2. Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’sSweet Thursday, but it’s OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But “said” is far less intrusive than “grumbled”, “gasped”, “cautioned”, “lied”. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated” and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” … he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs”.
5. Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose”. This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”, what do the “Ameri­can and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things, unless you’re ­Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.