Comments on: What Makes a Great Writer?

By: Deionna Maria Bradley

Deionna Maria Bradley — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 16:50:17 +0000

Hi Kristen. I am a young person whom took a great interest in writing and reading.If you are looking for some suggestions on what to read, I could help you.
YA author Sarah Dessen wrote realistic fiction.So did Ellen Hopkins. With Sarah Dessen’s books, I would start with Just Listen. Ellen Hopkins’s book,Crank, is also another book I would recommand to read.
In Ya Fantasy/fiction i would recommand you to read Ameila Atwater-Rhodes’s books. One of my favorite series is the House of Night series by P.C. Cast. Love,betrayal,and jelousy take place in a plot to destroy evil. The supense will be unbearable.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.

From,
D.M. Bradley

By: Kerry Meacham

Kerry Meacham — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 18:02:22 +0000

Starting in August as you recommended. Great post on reading. Three questions, keeping in mind I’m new to the novel writing game. What ratio of genre to out of genre should I strive for? What ratio of fiction to non-fiction should I strive for? How should these change as I mature as a writer? I know one size doesn’t fit all, but any advice is appreciated.

Thanks,

Kerry

By: Johan Vancaneghem

Johan Vancaneghem — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 10:48:16 +0000

Since recorded history, info has been matter, now it is a fluidium, and it evaporates until there is no more record of all history, because stone became wax, papyrus, paper, digits and went astray, adding mass to meaning, by human’s nature, which even puts its imaginary future into a theory that works before he grasped its consequence as much as his size, and than comes back on and to his former idea, when it was still an opinion.

I am having a poetic episode, once in a while, because I am too lazy to type.

By: Johan Vancaneghem

Johan Vancaneghem — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 09:55:04 +0000

An note ‘for the record’ here : “Maybe, reality is so funny that it is filled with irony”, and it works even playing it backwards (remember… the golden sixties hey)?

By: Johan Vancaneghem

Johan Vancaneghem — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 09:37:21 +0000

I am having the same problem, I write and write, my FB notes are filled with characters. We ‘beat’ the Neanderthals because we had a wider understanding of symbolism and we didn’t like their appearance too much (symbolism, haha), so we hardly mated with them. That history repeats itself is obvious, but first you have to recognize and correlate, than evaluate and than differentiate (in a nutshell). You COULD suppose : “Hey, the above is the exact description of the current racism”. The other race being the Neanderthal, and Religion being symbolism, and money being the asset (cave, water, …). But that would be too short of a cut, as you already suspected. Yesterday I was in typing mode again and wrote the following (you’ll immediately understand how I suck as writer)
To help a little, it was about PURPOSE
“”””””
The fun thing about ‘all things having a purpose’ is that what happens before is a need. Eg. a chair for being able to sit -that it is perfectly bisymmetrically designed, except out of need of purpose is sth else – but, ‘Art’ is than again made in order of ‘indirect purpose’, ‘purpose merger’ if you like. A leaf falling off a tree is considered following a ‘natural’ path, as I pick it out of the air and put it in my pocket it is an ‘atrificial’ path. If I had done this in order to describe it here, than it becomes a ‘conceptual example’. Than we go on:1.I had the experience once, and am now thinking about it in order to make my statement (purpose by random event memory).2. I simplify any idea of what occurs in nature (in this case, true: I see a tree outside the window here as I write) in order to give the example of the former (purpose by situational spontaneity) 3.I have contemplated about it whilst the event happening and am now elaborating my contemplation (half true, because I wanted to make another point, but I read the text above and picked a word ‘purpose’, read the short thread around it, and now I pick from my conditioned conceptual system of thinking, intercombined with spontanuous reflexion) 4. … x,… (meaning I will loose your attention and my lead).
Purpose!, … it occured to me in 1989, very funny, everybody like the Cure or the Simple Minds or U2, … and so on, and I had already been in the pseudo experience of ‘Beatle-mania’ since 1985. In 1989 I came across a saying sth like : “The ones who remembered the sixties the best, never lived through the sixties”. I had emotional doubts about Paul’s “death” at that time (let’s say I had to ‘ketchup’ a little, 20 years or so – only since ’72 out of my egg). So, the re-experienced sixties were a lie?! Another guy said “Life imitates art”, and we all know the Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame”. I combined those, and something very strange started to happen to me (and maybe you had it too). “Purpose” turned around, and suddenly I was no longer sure if “Art imitated Life or Life imitated Art”! I had to pend on that, till 1996. My grand-father was a religious Polish man washed ashore in Belgium. He was 81 and was terminal. We talked for the last 3 months of his life, every Sunday. He believed in ‘fate’ and I was a ‘choice’ adept. He had evolved from a Catholic to a Christian, and I from a Christian to an agnostic athe-ist. He died. I contemplated and came to the conclusion that youth had the illusion of choice, and age had the illusion of fate. Being somewhere in the middle, that was ok for me for a few months. But I still like(d) the sixties, knowing that they were idealized after they happened (how this works in the mass mind, I will not elaborate on that here).
Art imitates life or life imitates art in its purpose ?
“Both” is the considered answer. Why ? Because of the leaf falling from the tree. Act and intention, intention preceeds acting, frequency dictates timing of the intention, (the slower, chemically induced)emotion links the experience to the reflexive reflecting when the act is considered as contemporary with the faster, electrically induced mind) and … spontaneity of purpose occurs! This is just a fraction of the description of ‘creativity’, but ok, a good start. So, purpose is interaction with nature (in its primal phase of the evolutionary stadium of lower primates – anyway), that complies through cause and effect, in an end result. Of course, as you all know, the higher this goal in Maslow’s triangle, the more profound the act becomes. That is why the hierarchy – a concept grown out of creatures spawn in an environment with a horizon, a gravity field, a ‘flat’ surface, stagging and defining ‘up’ and ‘down’, 3-dimensional relativity estimation, and a boundried embodiment (the body) that ostentively defines ‘the self’ as opposed to ‘the other’- is as much a mental process as a physical one. That is one of the reasons the supreme male chimpansee sits in the highest tree, … . Ok.
Imagine (haha), we grew out of the former stadium. I jump a little forward in time, enlightment with Robespierre and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and… voila: Napoleon wants to know how far his canons shoot, and has the metric system introduced. So as from than it starts as a known concept to a mass (Europeans). It is like a domino effect, with an infinite exponent ). ONLY 70 years later!!! There is a ‘smartass’ (He’d even like that term), that says, “I am going to re-invent an astroligical metric system” and said “everything is relative to THAT system”. He used light as a rule. His idea put a square behind any given previously described (unknown) infinite exponent!!! ‘What a hell of guy that was!!’, I am sorry Dr. Einstein, I forgot how modest you were ). A. Einstein was so peaceful he had to be told in Switzerland, many years later, what a terrible ‘mistake’ he made. Germany was shooting protons, but only had to shoot neutrons – for details watch wiki!. US, gave the money, and could pick and save many Jews, after a 5-year war, and made it to the first A-bomb to smuther the last hard resistance in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To make that up, they put a cherry on top to provide for an economical counter part for the cold world order and organized a Marshall plan to save Europe. True heroes, the US, always have been, and their government will certainly always believe it. Anyway, the Common Wealth had never died, and STILL didn’t want to adopt the frog’s metric system;), the Jews got half their country back, and the Arabs started a cold and hot oil burned war. You know, history in a nutshell. The Americans told their soldiers to zero in on the Communist thought with a gun, and too many brains were blown, but thought never ‘left’ the minds. US adopted capitalism, Europe too, but fed it with a red sauce of Socialism, and the East isolated itself with Communism. TV came through and one-way multi -info was born, computer came through and global village became half a global city. The other half STILL couldn’t afford a computer, worse the weren’t fed at all, let alone by info. OK, everybody knows his history, as we weren’t taught in school.
So, how DOES the interaction between the imitation of Art and Life happen ? Well, I don’t know how fast because of the primary described component (Napoleon and his canons), and second (E=mc square) is already fixed in photons. But as a primate…. hmmm… difficult question…
Let’s give it a try. Intelligence is merely as important as creativity. A Chimpansee will drink water, and we drink H2O (and gave the elements a meaning). In the mean time another hydro power plant is built.
So, Leonardo’s quest of Religion vs Science… 0-1 (for Science). But Leonardo would say : “That’s cheating, science came later!”, “Yes!”, screams the Pope. Hold on, 1 standard through measurement and 1 through imagining the observation of measurement before the measurement happened (A.E.)
Wikipedia Free:”
675 Rømer and Huygens, moons of Jupiter 220,000[76][99]
1729 James Bradley, aberration of light 301,000[84]
1849 Hippolyte Fizeau, toothed wheel 315,000[84]
1862 Léon Foucault, rotating mirror 298,000±500[84]
1907 Rosa and Dorsey, EM constants 299,710±30[89][90]
1926 Albert Michelson, rotating mirror 299,796±4[100]
1950 Essen and Gordon-Smith, cavity resonator 299,792.5±3.0[92]
1958 K.D. Froome, radio interferometry 299,792.50±0.10[101]
1972 Evenson et al., laser interferometry 299,792.4562±0.0011[98]
1983 17th CGPM, definition of the metre 299,792.458 (exact)[102
”
One Thousand Nine Hundred and Eighty Tree ‘solar’ cycles since countdown ;-((
We are not only primates, but pretty slow ones too!
“””””””

That was yesterday, (feels like a month ago).
As I read it again, I read a constant ego-tripping supression or showing of the ego of the writer (ironically being myself, only yesterday). So a character (conditioned correlation) in its relation to the other characters (words describing commonly preconcepted projections, a first array triggering mental correlation combined with a lower emotional correlation) and the gaps in between (elaborating and helping the subject with verbs, prepositions, etc.)- sentence – inter actively triggers the second array of correlations that are more emotional of nature.
Lack of interest is defined in the subject, but provokes as much attachment in the frustration and/or need to find what you are looking for.
Imagine browsing through the web for sth specific, entering more and more words till nothing complies (you know the feeling and mechanism, I don’t have to explain you that).
Reading is a trained ‘serial’ mechanism through previously conditioned correlation.
English is a captive language
Chinese is a captive character
English is capturing concept through evolutionary conceptual correlation in its tradition, with rules that can be stretched.
eg. adverb, adverbial (‘having the same function as an adverb), adverbially (used as having the same function as an adverb)
You want to keep your initial designation and adapt it to ‘la nuance’ you feel. You might just go to ‘adverbiallistically enhanced’ meaning : “stretched until it could have been used as having the same function as an adverb”
I bet any of us probably didn’t feel the urgent need to do THAT, or did we ?!
Mandarin (Chinese) will just add a few details in their character until they have the need for character 6 Thousand and….

So you see, writing can be difficult, and maybe I can get a little help from my friends (?).

Greets

Johan

By: Johan Vancaneghem

Johan Vancaneghem — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 05:02:22 +0000

What is logos to the definition of the encryptive concept? If a registration occurs it creates a wrinkle through time and conciousness by the interpretation. The code is the language, for it to hit emotion the reader has to become a relative to its effort to equal a stated value. My manager cannot afford me to give time here. But this is an interesting question, Kristen. PS: I wrote a text yesterday, but I didn’t quite know the structure of this site (after just having subscribed, my sincere apologies).

By: MrShev

MrShev — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 11:42:04 +0000

Superb post – a literary agent told me the exact same thing, but to read within the genre: read the writers that he felt were brilliant, but didn’t sell; and the writers that do and try and see what is different – what made one more accessible than the other? Why does one writer capture the public’s imagination, and not the other?

He also recommended reading an author’s first work and to try and see what the agent or publisher saw.

BTW, I don’t know which category I fall within!

By: jasonamyers

jasonamyers — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:09:19 +0000

In reply to Kristen Lamb. I'm reading Hunger Games right now. The start of it was slow, but once the action starts, I was into it BIG time. Should wrap it up tonight.

By: Kristen Lamb

Kristen Lamb — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:46:44 +0000

In reply to Jamie Harrington. Okay, well now that this is the second recommendation, I will have to read it next. Thanks!

By: Jamie Harrington

Jamie Harrington — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:38:41 +0000

You want to read a book that will challenge everything you thought you knew about writing?

The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins. — It was one of those books I never ever would have read…. and I am SO glad I did!