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If you live in America, chances are you've heard (or used) the phrase "Don't put all your eggs in one basket."
Most of us know it means, essentially, that you shouldn't make all your plans based on one possible thing happening. But it's kind of a weird phrase, right? Have you ever stopped to wonder where it originated?
Its use in print has been traced to the novel "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes in the early 1600s, although it possibly was mistranslated to an inexact English idiom from the original and may have other roots in Italian phrases.
Different cultures around the world all have their own similar sayings — proverbs, if you will — that make sense to those who've grown up speaking the language but sound downright odd to anyone who hasn't.
James Chapman is fascinated by these sayings and how they translate across languages and cultures....
If you want to make something that people really care about, that they actually give a hot shit about, you have to care about it yourself. Because if you don’t, then try as you might, it’ll come out in the final product.
The reason for this?
Making something is hard. Making something you don’t care about is even harder.
The only way you’ll be able to consistently work, when you don’t want to work, consistently try when you don’t want to try, is by deeply and honestly caring about your work....
Everything I’ve learned has been self-taught.
And I’d love to share some of my favorite lessons.
I’ve emptied my swipe file. What you see here is everything I’ve starred and saved over the past five years. If you want to learn more about writing for the web, content marketing, and the most persuasive way to communicate online, I think here’s a pretty good place to start....
About six months ago, Pocket Gems, a mobile game developer, launched a new platform called Episode. It allows writers to script a story and then turn it into an animated interactive mobile story. It combines parts of TV shows, comics, and novels, and provides the unique ability for readers to have some control of how the story goes.
I started writing on the platform almost as soon as it launched and have written three stories to date. My most successful story, Finding Mr. Wright, has built a significant audience in a short time. So far it has an audience of 163,000 readers, who have collectively read over 1,222,000 chapters of my story....
Once upon the time--1969, to be exact--The Valley of Gwangi (see poster, left) was made. Based on a story concept by stop-motion pioneer Willis O'Brien (King Kong), and employing the stop-motion effects of Ray Harryhausen (former apprentice to O'Brien), it was and is the greatest cowboy-dinosaur movie ever made.
In the summer of 1970, a pencil-necked geek named Matt (see photo, right) discovered Gwangi quite by accident when it was the opening "B-movie" at his local theater with When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Matt was all of seven, and he hooted and hollered and cheered throughout the film.
He was all alone that evening ... well, sort of all alone....
When we asked you to nominate your favorite writing blog as one of the top 10 blogs for writers, we got over 1,100 nominations! Wonderful to see how passionate readers are about their favorite writing blog.
It’s great to see some very interesting new blogs amongst the winners! Of note is that quite a few blogs in the top 10 are associated with author platforms. Make sure you visit all the top 10 blogs to get to know the new crop of top writing blogs....
Since launching in private beta last year, Medium has been building up its platform, which aims to offer a simple but 'beautiful' reading and writing experienceIt was one year ago this week when the online publishing world was abuzz with the news that two of Twitter's founders had launched a new platform called Medium, in private beta.In the early days only a select group of people were allowed behind the scenes to contribute content to Medium.
Some details on the platform were made public via an announcement post from Ev Williams, in which he described Medium as "a new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends".In the past year the group of people invited to write has grown, and we are told it "should be a short wait from now" when the platform will be available for all to use.
The main aim of Medium is to be "the best place to read and write about things that matter", and this emphasis on both the writing and reading experience has been reflected in its approach over the past 12 months....
The headline will greatly influence your website traffic, bounce rates, conversions and trust. Millions of new blog posts, billions of new emails and thousands of hours of videos are uploaded online each day....
When each of your readers is following hundreds, or thousands, of other twitter accounts, you need your tweets to stand out and get their attention in the split second it takes to read a headline. This is why headlines are so important. This is what will draw your readers in to actually see what you have written. If your headline isn’t compelling enough, it won’t matter what your article has to say. No one will ever see it....
I’m working on the followup to Steal Like An Artist, my book about how to be more creative in the digital age. It’s been a real pain in the ass. Here are five things that have helped: 1. Shut up and write the book.
Curating eclectic interestingness from culture's collective brain... Sigmund Freud — key figure in the making of consumer culture, deft architect of his own myth, modern plaything — spent a fair amount of his career exploring the psychology of dreams. In 1908, he turned to the intersection of fantasies and creativity, and penned a short essay titled “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” eventually republished in the anthology The Freud Reader (public library). Though his theories have been the subject of much controversy and subsequent revision, they remain a fascinating formative framework for much of the modern understanding of the psyche. Predictably, Freud begins by tracing the subject matter to its roots in childhood, stressing, as Anaïs Nin eloquently did — herself trained in psychoanalysis — the importance of emotional investment in creative writing...
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So a portmanteau is formed from two french words, "porter" which meanscarry and "manteau" which means mantle – a mantle is a cloak, the kind Anna wore in Frozen, or if you are a more traditionalist fairy tale lover, what Red Riding Hood wore en route to grandma’s house (to be honest, I’ve always thought it was a cape but I digress). A manteau is more of a clothes valet, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Put them together and you use portmanteau to refer to travelling bags or suitcases (because they carry your cloaks around?) only these bags are old-fashioned, made from leather and can open into compartments. Here are some examples....
The most brilliant writers and clearest thinkers I personally know have gone on to become lawyers, web developers, and even doctors. They wouldn’t be caught dead as content writers.
That’s a shame, because writing and developing great content is an incredibly valuable profession — and it requires a unique sensibility that is just as difficult and worthwhile to pursue. It doesn’t come easy.
But I don’t think everyone sees it that way — I’ve come across hundreds of writers who think they’re qualified to opine on behalf of my company just because they speak English.
Content writing still suffers from a lack of pride, skill, and craft. How do we change that?...
I guess I’m in a metaphysical mood today. Thinking about writing for the internet, how it’s different, and finding your own style.
So, let’s set the scene…
Seth Godin, Lao-Tzu and I walk into Hemingway’s Bar & Grill. Godin says, “I’ll have a Purple Cow.” I say, in my best Homer Simpson salutation, “Beer me.” Lao-Tzu says, “Ommmmm.”
Drinks with Seth Godin
That’s me channeling Seth Godin, echoing Lao-Tzu.
Except I’m not a bald guy and I don’t wear saffron like either of these wise men....
The key thing to realise, Pinker argues, is that writing is "cognitively unnatural." For almost all human existence, nobody wrote anything; even after that, for millennia, only a tiny elite did so. And it remains an odd way to communicate. You can't see your readers' facial expressions. They can't ask for clarification. Often, you don't know who they are, or how much they know. How to make up for all this?
Pinker's answer builds on the work of two language scholars, Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas, who label their approach "joint attention". Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone else's attention to something visible.
A Breadcrumb Trail of Recent US Writing and Publishing Stats: - 2012 fiction books published with an ISBN: adult fiction 67,254; YA and juvenile fiction 20,339
- 2012 Net book sales: $27.1 billion
- 2011 books published: traditionally published 347,178; self-published 235,000
- 76 percent of all books released in 2008 were self-published
- Roughly 50 percent of all fiction published (traditional or self-published) is a romance, mystery, sci-fi, or fantasy story
- 1900 independent bookstore locations in 2012
- 1 percent chance across all genres of a published book being stocked in a brick-and-mortar store20 percent of all books sold in 2012 were e-books..
It was just more than a year ago that Ev Williams and Biz Stone created the publishing platform Medium....
At the heart of Medium is a sense of connectedness between those who create words and those who consume them, and the site’s future looks promising to technology experts like Warren.“
As a platform, I envision Medium becoming a curated magazine of sorts that lives digitally,” she wrote via email. “I think with a strong tablet app that is able to curate Medium’s content flipboard-style, the platform could actually also be a publication in its own right.”
For now, the site continues to guide readers through a consumptive experience unlike any other — and meanwhile, the writers are responsible for building up Medium’s content and shaping the site, post by post. “We want to optimize for great interactions between writers and readers,” Davies wrote via email....
The author of horror classics like The Shining and its 2013 sequel Doctor Sleep says the best writers hook their readers with voice, not just action....
Stephen King: There are all sorts of theories and ideas about what constitutes a good opening line. It's tricky thing, and tough to talk about because I don't think conceptually while I work on a first draft -- I just write. To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar.
But there's one thing I'm sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.
How can a writer extend an appealing invitation -- one that's difficult, even, to refuse?We've all heard the advice writing teachers give: Open a book in the middle of a dramatic or compelling situation, because right away you engage the reader's interest. This is what we call a "hook," and it's true, to a point. This sentence from James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice certainly plunges you into a specific time and place, just as something is happening:
"They threw me off the hay truck about noon."...
Hold the front page used to have a interesting, and updated daily, section called 'story ideas.' The idea was simple - you have slow news days, and these were ideas to see you through....A rainy day in Bury, obviously, isn’t news. However, hopefully these 10 websites could be of use. Yes, some of them are obvious, but I thought I’d list them all the same.
The more talkative half of the famed magic duo says that even for professionals, this magic act is a tough act to swallow... I didn’t learn fire-eating to conquer my fears. I learned fire-eating because I desperately wanted to be in show business. You don’t want to learn fire-eating from a book, but that’s how I started. I read Step Right Up! by Dan Mannix—the 1950 memoir of a real-life carny—and I wanted to be “with it.” Dan didn’t explain how to eat fire, but I felt I could read between the lines and figure it out. I was 19 years old, and like many men that age, I felt invincible. I wasn’t, and you aren’t. Remember that. Do not eat fire! I practiced all afternoon and burned the snot out of my mouth and lips. My mouth looked like wall-to-wall herpes sores, with cartoonish, giant teeth glued to my lips. There were so many blisters I couldn’t press my lips together. I sure couldn’t have whistled. I thought I had to ignore the pain and I did. I’ve always been good at focus. My girlfriend arrived home and screamed in horror (19-year-old men often make 19-year-old women do that). We didn’t kiss for a week . . . and we were 19. Don’t learn fire-eating from a magazine, but here’s how it works. Just, don’t do it!r... [What can I say? Genius storytelling, writing ~ Jeff]
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Lots of wonderful lessons from the wisdom of these proverbs from around the world.