Posted in Movies, tagged gwyneth paltrow, joseph fiennes, movie reviews, Movies, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare, shakespeare in love, shakespeare on film, shakespeare's birthday, Shakespeare's plays, Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare on 24 Apr 2014| 3 Comments »
Yesterday was the 450th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s purported birth (we know the day he was christened, but not the day he was born so, as with Most Things William, we’re really just guessing).
In honor of this anniversary, I neither watched one of his plays nor read any of his poetry.
Nope.
I watched Shakespeare in Love.
Travesty! Sacrilege!
Feh. (more…)
Posted in Books, Writing, tagged books, Characters, creative writing, favorite authors, favorite books, gabriel garcia marquez, Marcel Proust, reading lists, Shakespeare, William Shakespeare, Writing, writing tips on 06 Jan 2014| 9 Comments »
Writers aren’t like normal people.
When writers read–be it a book, an article, or sometimes even a headline–we study, parse, and edit. We re-word what we read (“It would be better like this”), we laugh out loud at ugly phrases (“He threw up his hands”), and we will kick a book across the room before we’ll read another page filled with moronic characters and Swiss cheese plots.
This can take a lot of the enjoyment out of reading, but on the flip side, there are joys in reading only writers can experience. We have WIWI moments (“Wish I’d Written It!”) and can find ecstasy in a well-wrought sentence or a surprising image.
We also learn from reading. We learn a lot.
Unraveling Time
Desert Wind
Ploughman's Son
Ploughman King
The Year the Cloud Fell
The Spirit of Thunder
Shadow of the Storm
The Cry of the Wind
Beneath a Wounded Sky
Cryptogenesis: A Memoir