Just this in from yesterday's Colbert report.
Jamie Oliver tries to dissuade kids from eating chicken nuggets by showing how they're made (yuch!), BUT IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE!
Watch Jamie Oliver's face and Colbert's patriotic reaction! (USA! Number1!)
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Thought for Food - Corn Diapers, Fatty Foods & Jamie Oliver | ||||
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Here are a few of the wonderful events available to English language writers in
Festival
Shakespeare and Company Festivalandco June 18- 20, 2010 :a major event on the
Geneva Writers Group, GWG runs an excellent 2-day workshop every two years. Next in 2012.
Salon du Livre March 26- 31, 2010 So many books, authors and events I personally find it a little overwhelming. But definitely worth a look!
NEW: This just in !!
Wordmeadow Writing Workshops in the French Alps : from the 29th April to the 2 May in the mountain
Story: Robert McKee (twice a year in
I will be adding the links and more information as I receive it. If you would like to recommend a workshop, festival or retreat, please leave a comment or contact me at [email protected] (This includes poetry festivals!)
WRITER SERVICES
How to Write the Screenplay That Sells and Sell the Screenplay You Wrote
If you are looking for or offering writers workshops or services, I will be happy to post your text. Please contact me at pariswritersnews AT gmail.com .
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Laurel Zuckerman talks with Frances Gendlin about memoir and travel writing, as well as Mexico as a writer’s refuge, Saul Bellow, new technologies and her book.: Paris, Moi and the Gang...A Memoir of Sorts
Continue reading "Interview with Frances Gendlin on Paris, Moi and the Gang, a Memoir of Sorts" »
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1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4 If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.
5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
6 Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
9 Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
10 Prayer might work. Or reading something else. Or a constant visualisation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.
To read the complete article in The Guardian click here.
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In France's Regional Elections, Nicolas Sarkozy's center right party UMP suffered major losses, in part because the President's supporters abstained from voting at all.
Why?
The financial crisis and recession have hurt governing parties everywhere, but some of the blame clearly goes to President Sarkozy himself.
Here are five of the biggest mistakes which have hurt his popularity and credibility--most crucially with his own supporters:
1. Allowing his son to
become a candidate to
head EPAD, which runs La Défense
Prince Jean has not even graduated law
school yet. The effort to drop him into a key post as head of
2. Launching a pointless debate on
"National Identity"
Why? The French LIKE Sarkozy's promise to
get tough with crime and expect him to deliver on it (which he has not yet
managed to do.) Why this offensive and distracting sideshow? It hurt feelings
and awakened the beast of the Far Right--to absolutely no purpose whatsoever!
3. Appointing Frédéric Mitterand Culture
Minister
Poaching the left for talent worked
wonders with DSK, Bernard Kouchner and others. Claiming the Mitterand
name was apparently so irresistable that Sarkozy ignored warnings about Mitterand's
book La Mauvaise Vie in which he recounts sex tourism with Thai "garçons"
(translate that however you like). No problem until Minister of Culture
Mitterand attacked the
4. Encouraging Valérie Pécresse, Minister
of Higher Education, to sling mud in a negative campaign that disgusted Ile de
France voters.
What a weird, inept, ill-considered
campaign we just saw! Sarkozy parachuted party hacks who knew nothing about the
local region into key positions then acted surprized when locals didn't
feel like voting. A strange mistake..
5. Betraying the spirit and the
promise of Grenelle.
After a brilliant start in making the
environment a centerpiece of this political strategy, Sarkozy abandoned agreed
on goals, one after another --clean water, reduction of pesticides, carbon tax. Under
pressure from farmers he is reported to have said that he's had enough of
ecology! A major error, one which allows the left to pick up the mantel
of saving the environment in a Green-Socialist alliance that Sarko had a good
chance of breaking...
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This just in !
The 21st PWW, organized by WICE: www.wice-paris.org
is scheduled for June
27-July 2, 2010 and hopes that you will be able to join us for an intensive week
devoted to honing your craft with a stellar
faculty.
Short Story - Sheila Kohler is the author of 7
novels and 3 collections of short stories. Becoming Jane Eyre, her latest novel,
not only describes the inner lives of the Brontë siblings, but also the creative
process of Charlotte Brontë.
Poetry -- Alice Notley has published 30 collections
of poetry. Beginning as a poet of the second
generation of the New York School, she has developed a mostly autobiographical
stream-of-consciousness style.
Creative Nonfiction -- Mimi Schwartz, the author of five books, most recently, Good
Neighbors, Bad Times, Echoes of My Father’s German Village,
was a winner of the ForeWord Book of the Year Award in Memoir for 2008 and of
the New Hampshire NHWP Outstanding Literary Nonfiction
Award.
Novel -- Matt Thorne, judge of the 2008 PWW’s
Paris Prize for fiction, is an English writer born in 1974 a who has published
seven novels. His second book Eight Minutes Idle, which drew on Thorne's
experiences of having worked in a call centre, was published in 1999 and won an
Encore Award; his 2004 novel, Cherry, was longlisted for the Brooker
Prize.
Early-Bird tuition is 650€ which includes your choice of workshop
(meeting Monday through Friday for a total of 15 hours), an individual
conference with your writer in residence, afternoon and evening events as well as the Closing Dinner on July
2nd. For an additional fee of
75€, you can sign up for an individual Agent consultation on July
2.
Two half-tuition merit Patricia Painton scholarships are available to
Registrants – deadline: April 30th. Please consult the Guidelines for
manuscript requirements.
For more information: www.pariswritersworkhop.org . Email:[email protected]
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Can writers live off writing?
According to Jennifer Schuessler writing in the NYT's writer blog Paper Cuts , "a 2008 study of the creative economy from the National Endowment for the Arts reported that full-time “writers and authors” earned a median annual salary of more than $50,000."
Actually that's not too bad. Though as Nassim Nicolas Taleb demonstrates in his brilliant (and quite entertaining) THE BLACK SWAN, a few writers rake in millions while most eat beans.
What about great writers? Surely they must do well?
Lapham's Quarterly has compiled a fun and shocking list of great writers' day jobs. (Thank heavens for the Post Office!)
Do you really think you should earn more than Charlotte Bronte, William Faulkner, and Kafka ?
If you hesitate even for a second, it's time to reread Jane Eyre. $1,838 she earned, Miss Bronte, taken care of someone else's brats, while she wrote Jane Eyre.
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1 The prerequisite for me is to keep my well of ideas full. This means living as full and varied a life as possible, to have my antennae out all the time.
2 Ted Hughes gave me this advice and it works wonders: record moments, fleeting impressions, overheard dialogue, your own sadnesses and bewilderments and joys.
3 A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.
4 It is the gestation time which counts.
5 Once the skeleton of the story is ready I begin talking about it, mostly to Clare, my wife, sounding her out.
6 By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I'm talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren.
7 Once a chapter is scribbled down rough – I write very small so I don't have to turn the page and face the next empty one – Clare puts it on the word processor, prints it out, sometimes with her own comments added.
8 When I'm deep inside a story, living it as I write, I honestly don't know what will happen. I try not to dictate it, not to play God.
9 Once the book is finished in its first draft, I read it out loud to myself. How it sounds is hugely important.
10 With all editing, no matter how sensitive – and I've been very lucky here – I react sulkily at first, but then I settle down and get on with it, and a year later I have my book in my hand.
To read the complete article in the Guardian, click here.
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1 Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work. I find watching films also instructive. Nearly every modern Hollywood blockbuster is hopelessly long and baggy. Trying to visualise the much better films they would have been with a few radical cuts is a great exercise in the art of story-telling. Which leads me on to . . .
2 Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts – including my own – where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: "This is where the novel should actually start." A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it. In fact . . .
3 Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I've got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish – they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.
4 Writing fiction is not "self- expression" or "therapy". Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. I think of my novels as being something like fairground rides: my job is to strap the reader into their car at the start of chapter one, then trundle and whizz them through scenes and surprises, on a carefully planned route, and at a finely engineered pace.
5 Respect your characters, even the minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story; it is worth thinking about what your minor characters' stories are, even though they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist's. At the same time . . .
6 Don't overcrowd the narrative. Characters should be individualised, but functional – like figures in a painting. Think of Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Mocked, in which a patiently suffering Jesus is closely surrounded by four threatening men. Each of the characters is unique, and yet each represents a type; and collectively they form a narrative that is all the more powerful for being so tightly and so economically constructed. On a similar theme . . .
7 Don't overwrite. Avoid the redundant phrases, the distracting adjectives, the unnecessary adverbs. Beginners, especially, seem to think that writing fiction needs a special kind of flowery prose, completely unlike any sort of language one might encounter in day-to-day life. This is a misapprehension about how the effects of fiction are produced, and can be dispelled by obeying Rule 1. To read some of the work of Colm Tóibín or Cormac McCarthy, for example, is to discover how a deliberately limited vocabulary can produce an astonishing emotional punch.
8 Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.
9 Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too.
10 Talent trumps all. If you're a really great writer, none of these rules need apply. If James Baldwin had felt the need to whip up the pace a bit, he could never have achieved the extended lyrical intensity of Giovanni's Room. Without "overwritten" prose, we would have none of the linguistic exuberance of a Dickens or an Angela Carter. If everyone was economical with their characters, there would be no Wolf Hall . . . For the rest of us, however, rules remain important. And, crucially, only by understanding what they're for and how they work can you begin to experiment with breaking them.
To read the complete article in The Guardian, click here.
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Why does steak taste better with a glass of red wine?
Turns out
"protein softens the wines's tanins, and red wine also helps counteract
potentially harmful substances --oxidized fats called malonaldehades, or
MDA--released when meat is digested. "
Yumm! (see NYT's article)
It's only a
matter of time before Macdo introduces the Health Menu--big mac plus
One small problem: medical science refuses to limit the benefits to FRENCH wine! Chilean, Californian and even, sigh, Italian grapes might also do the trick.
For more food stories, see:
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