Website review: The Compleat Steve :: Essays :: Wri...
AXiLLA discovered this in Writing
•2 reviews since May 19, 2006
writing
•compleatsteve.com/essays/easy.htm
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Reviews of this website
ikkepagrasset rated 15 months ago- This is one of the things that most made me want to become a writer. Steve Martin -- can it get any better?
- zenmeta4 rated 22 months ago
- Writing Is Easy! By Steve Martin
Writing is the most easy, pain-free, and happy way to pass the time of all the arts.It is true that sometimes agony visits the head of a writer. At those moments, I stop writing and relax, knowing that words can be changed, rethought, fiddled with, and ultimately denied.
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION - I would like to recommend that all writers live in California. I feel sorry for writers who live in places like Czechoslovakia, where I imagine it gets pretty dank. These writers are easy to spot. Their books are often filled with disease and negativity. If you're going to write about disease, I would say California is the place to do it. Dwarfism is never funny, but look at what happened when it was dealt with in California. Seven happy dwarfs. Can you imagine seven dwarfs in Czechoslovakia? You would get seven melancholic dwarfs at best.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA: WHY IT'S A BAD TITLE - I admit that "Love in the time of ..." is a great title, up to a point. You're reading along, you're happy, it's about love. I like the way the word time comes in - a nice, nice feeling. Then the morbid Cholera appears. I was happy till then. Why not "Love inthe Time of the Blue, Blue, Bluebirds"?
A LITTLE EXPERIMENT - I took the following passage, which was no doubt written in some depressing place, and attempted to rewrite it under the sunny influence of California:
Most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in eternal memory (of people, things, deeds, nations) and in redressibility (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs). Both are false faiths. In reality the opposite is true: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed. - Milan Kundera.
I let the above paragraph filter through my mind. The following New Paragraph emerged:
I feel pretty, Oh so pretty, I feel pretty, and witty, and bright.
Kundera was just too wordy.
WRITER'S BLOCK: A MYTH - Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners. The trick I use when I have a momentary stoppage is virtually foolproof, and I'm happy to pass it along. Go to an already published novel and find a sentence that you absolutely adore. Copy it down in your manuscript. Usually, that sentence will lead you to another sentence, and pretty soon your own ideas will start to flow. If they don't, copy down the next sentence in the novel. You can safely use up to three sentences of someone else's work -- unless you're friends, then two. The odds of being found out are very slim, and even if you are there's usually no jail time.
A DEMONSTRATION OF ACTUAL WRITING - It's easy to talk about writing, and even easier to do it. Watch:
Call me Ishmael. It was cold, very cold here in the mountain of Kilimanjaroville. I could hear a bell. It was tolling. I knew exactly for who it was tolling, too. It was tolling for me, Ishmael Twist. That's right, Ishmael Twist. - Writing Is Easy! By Steve Martin
