Everyone who attempts to write something inevitably gets asked the dreaded question: What is your book about? As the writer you’re the least qualified to answer it until the book is practically finished and that could be years of hard work from now before you can answer that question legitimately. When you’re writing a story you’re basically trying to answer that question everytime you go to work.
The question assumes that you know what you’re doing. I don’t. Read More
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This is a tutorial for backing up your mission critical data. That novel that you only have one copy of, your thesis, your tax returns, your family’s vacation photos. Whatever is really important that you can’t lose. If you just have this stuff on your hard drive and don’t have a backup system in place: get one! Hard drives break. Read More
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I’ve been writing my first novel for almost two years and I’m almost done. I wrote the first draft by hand from September 2008 to January 2009, then started typing and rewriting in August 2009. I estimate that my book will be around 80,000 words and as I write this I’m over 70,000.
So it’s time for me to start wrapping things up and finish the book. Read More
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This is an ongoing series aimed at being more productive.
Writing is simple: you sit in a chair and put one word down and then another word and so on. Writing well is a different thing altogether and one shouldn’t confuse the two. So instead of learning how to write well (which comes naturally from practice and study) I think the writer is best to get words on the page and finish what he starts. With this attitude the most important question isn’t: How do I write? but rather How do I sit in a chair?
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Until recently, the thought of investment has never entered my mind. I know that it exists. I know that I should probably learn about it or do something about it, but investment has always been like fat women or balloons in the sky—nothing to do with me. It’s probably a mistake. But a mistake that I think most young people share: we consider ourselves impervious to old age and live our financial lives in the moment, never looking beyond the month’s rent.
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Around this time I like to think back on the previous year and connect all the dots. Where I was, to where I am, to where I’m going. A lot of things happened. In hindsight it seemed a year where things were eliminated. A year where I got rid of the unnecessary and focused on the the things that mattered. Read More
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For one year I worked on a play that, ultimately, I never finished. I wrote many scenes and hundreds of pages of dialogue meant to be performed on stage. The biggest challenge, and the reason why I decided to write a play, was because I wasn’t confident writing dialogue. It was my kryptonite, and I was terrified of getting it wrong. I felt that the best dialogue would come from the best plays. So that’s what I read. I studied Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, David Mamet, and Harold Pinter, among others, and every day I wrote dialogue, for one year, trying to construct a stage play.
In the end, I had nothing.
But damn, if I didn’t learn a lot Read More
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Once, a girl I had been trying to impress agreed to come over to my place. She would be over in about twenty minutes. I lived by myself, and somehow, over the course of the week I had avoided all forms of housekeeping, the result being, what usually happens when a male lives alone with no lover to protest his self-imposed squalor, a mess. Dishes overflowed from the sink, onto the counter and stove, weeks old spaghetti was pasted to the floor, laundry was everywhere, the flap of the garbage no longer opened because it was so full of trash, and worst of all the bathroom hadn’t been cleaned for weeks. Towel fuzz covered the counter, the sink was water-stained, toothpaste-stained, and spit-stained, while the tub was blackened, and the toilet literally had something growing in it.
How, did it come to this? Read More
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Hi, my name is Andrew Markle, thanks for finding your way here.
This blog started because I wanted a forum to write some non-fiction outside of the queries and magazine pitches that so often seem to drain my energy and enthusiasm before I’ve written a word. It took me about a month to overcome the blog technicalities but it seems like that’s finally over and the website creases have been mostly ironed out. At least enough to start writing. The domain for my name was stolen, by some rogue doppelganger, so I went for a title that would allow me the same sort of freedom, which is basically: to write about what I want to write about. Read More
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