Letters Remain

Tag: writing

  • The Basic Plots of All Stories

    That there are a finite number of basic plots from which all other stories are formed is accepted as fact by many literary theorists: Georges Polti, for instance, believes that there are thirty-six dramatic situations, while Ronald Tobias believes there to be only twenty. The Internet Public Library has compiled together the most commonly accepted lists…

  • Stephen King on Writing Successfully

    It took Stephen King ten minutes to learn how to have a successful and financially rewarding career writing fiction and he believes he can teach us the same in ten minutes, too. King–author of countless novels and the much-lauded book on the craft, On Writing–starts with a short story of his youth followed by twelve tips professing…

  • Become Comfortable with Incompleteness: Writing Tips from Rands

    “Don’t write a book” is the first piece of advice Michael Lopp offers us in a post chronicling his writing process. Lopp–an engineering manager at Apple, author of Being Geek and Managing Humans, and more commonly known as Rands–details his tools and methods for writing a book and, as always, his advice is applicable to…

  • Six Principles of ‘Sticky’ Ideas

    In an excerpt from Made to Stick, brothers Dan and Chip Heath provide an outline of the six principles of creating ‘sticky’ ideas: Simplicity: “We must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. […] Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate…

  • Ira Glass on Being Wrong and Manufacturing Inspiration

    Discussing how many great stories “hinge on people being wrong”, Kathryn Schulz interviews This American Life host Ira Glass on the benefits of being wrong. I feel like being wrong is really important to doing decent work. To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it’s usually…

  • This American Life on Proposals and Pitches

    As a way to increase the quality of the many submissions they receive, This American Life staff offer some excellent tips on writing pitches. They go further, presenting four pitches that made it on air, describing why they succeeded: Each of these stories is a story in the most traditional sense: there are characters in some…

  • Writing to Subvert Audience Expectations

    Suggesting that “Audiences always think they know how a story will go”, Roz Morris of Nail Your Novel dissects Kathryn Bigelow‘s award-winning The Hurt Locker (spoilers galore) to see why a film that “[sets] up several conventional situations – and uses our expectations to pull us up short” made such an impact with audiences. Readers…

  • Evolutionary Theory of Fiction

    The age of “politically charged” analyses of literature has passed and the latest phase is that of analysing fiction through the lens of evolutionary psychology, looking at how the brain processes literature. Humans can comfortably keep track of three different mental states at a time, Ms. Zunshine said. For example, the proposition “Peter said that Paul…

  • Writing and Preparing for a Speech (Tim Ferriss’ System)

    The Tim Ferris technique for preparing a speech. For those aware of the concept, you may spot a resemblance to the snowflake method (previously), as typically used for writing novels. There are also some non-structural tips in the article (i.e. “No one should misunderstand you. Everything you say should be clear”.) Organise the speech using…

  • The Influence of Cognitive Fluency

    We’ve seen before how the cognitive fluency (how ‘easy’ it is to think of or comprehend something) of restaurant menus, stock ticker codes and physical exercises influence how complex, risky and even beautiful we perceive them to be. A recent PsyBlog article provides a summary of a number of cognitive fluency studies and here are…