Monday, March 19, 2012

Morrill's Monday Morning Mashup - 3/19/12

MASH-UP
creative combination
or mixing of content
from different sources.

Writers are often bombarded with information on what we should and shouldn't be doing in our writerly lives, especially with all of the turmoil in the publishing industry today. The posts I've listed this week reminded me that right and wrong is not black and white. It's a big, foggy gray area, and it varies for each individual.


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Jenna Blum writes "The Tortured Soul: Do You Need To Be One To Be A Writer?" in a post on Grub Street Daily. In this post, she muses about the caricature of the tortured soul, but the best part of the article is where she lists qualities you actually DO need to be a writer. http://grubdaily.org/?p=4944&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GrubStreetDaily+%28Grub+Street+Daily%29


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The post "How to Write Readable -- And Retweetable -- Tweets" by Dave Copeland on ReadWriteWeb.com includes some of the best advice I've seen on tweeting, including where to place your links within your tweet. Did you know it should not be placed at the end of your tweet? Read on! http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_write_readable_-_and_retweetable_-_tweets.php


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I love the New York Times article, "My Life's Sentences," by Jhumpa Lahiri. In this post, Lahiri discusses her love of sentences, both in reading and writing them, saying, "The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life." And though we're often taught that only after we complete our "shitty first draft" (Anne Lamott) should we then go through and perfect our sentences, Ms. Lahiri admits compulsion to analyze and perfect each sentence as she goes along. "All the revision I do — and this process begins immediately, accompanying the gestation — occurs on a sentence level." I felt better reading this article, because I admit, it's my natural way to write, also. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/my-lifes-sentences/?emc=eta1


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QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

Your assumptions are
your windows on the world.
Scrub them off every
once in a while,
or the light won't come in.
                            
                                         ~ Alan Alda 

4 comments:

  1. Looks like some good links here today, Jan. I'm going to visit them during breaks today.

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    Replies
    1. Madison, I think my favorite this week is the third one on "Life Sentences." So beautifully written. I think you'll like it, too.

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  2. We read Ms. Lahiri's story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, 1999, in one of the creative writing classes I took. It won the Pulitzer Prize, along with the Pen/Hemingway Award and New Yorker "Debut of the Year." Sometimes class requirements move us to read things we enjoy and that inform.

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  3. I tend to agonize over my word selection and sentence structure. It certainly slows the creative process down. Sounds like I'm not the only one.

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