We Need More Shelves…
A Book Review SIte from Jan McClintock
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Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story

By Jan
 on April 3, 2012

From the great post “Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story” by Maria Popova on Brain Pickings, here is the list:

  1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
  2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
  3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
  4. Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.
  5. Start as close to the end as possible.
  6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
  7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
  8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

© Jan McClintock of We Need More Shelves

In categories Uncategorized Tagged with quote, short story

Happiness

By Jan
 on April 30, 2010

True happiness is to understand our duties toward God and man; to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future; not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears, but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is abundantly sufficient; for he that is so wants nothing. The great blessings of mankind are with us, and within our reach; but we shut our eyes and, like people in the dark, fall foul of the very thing we search for without finding it. Tranquility is a certain equality of mind which no condition of fortune can either exalt or depress. There must be sound mind to make a happy man; there must be constancy in all conditions, a care for the things of this world but without anxiety; and such an indifference to the bounties of fortune that either with them or without them we may live content. True joy is serene. . . The seat of it is within, and there is no cheerfulness like the resolution of a brave mind that has fortune under its feat. It is an invincible greatness of mind not to be elevated or dejected with good or ill fortune. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it be – without wishing for what he has not.

Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD)

Evening Blues by Greg Glowka, courtesy of NanEtte Richardson Fine Art, San Antonio, Texas

© Jan McClintock of We Need More Shelves

In categories Art I Love Tagged with quote
Whilst Reading

Art I Love

By Jan
 on January 13, 2010
Whist Reading...
Whilst Reading: A Portrait of Sofia Kramskoya, the Painter’s Wife (Ivan Kramskoi, 1866)

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”

— Oscar Wilde

© Jan McClintock of We Need More Shelves

In categories Art I Love Tagged with quote
Clipper ship

Sail Away

By Jan
 on August 7, 2009
Clipper ship painting

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Mark Twain

© Jan McClintock of We Need More Shelves

In categories Art I Love Tagged with Mark Twain, quote