Absolutely excellent post by my pal Angelo Benuzzi.
I thought I should share it with my readers (and it’s also a great wayto test the “reblog” function).
Enjoy!
There are many strange tales about WWII, stories caught between documented facts and myth that echoes thru decades to be told again and again. This one is about Timur (Tamerlano for italians), his tomb, an archeologist and the nazi invasion of Russia.
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Short harmless post today.
I’m taking an in-deptyh look at Pinterest, a tool I’ve been using in the past as a simple “place to collect stuff”, but which I’d like to turn into a more hands-on resource for my writing, and not just as a promotional tool.
I’ll keep you posted as soon as something develops, but in the meantime… while I was crawling through the web reading articles, I stumbled on some interesting demographics.
Looks like Pinterest is a girl’s best friend, in terms of social networking and media sharing.
70% of the useres, they tell me, are female.
I wonder why.
Male users seem to stick to Tumblr or Flickr.
Curious.
I mean, this will not change the way I look at the Pinterest utility, but…
Now the fun bit of being both a scientist and a writer, is the fact that my first reaction is… why?
I’m still looking for a viable explanation.
This post is sort of an appendix to the last things I posted about writing on my Italian-language blog.
In a nutshell – when I’m planning a story, I jot down some basic ideas, a logline, a theme, some capsule sketches of the characters.
Then I outline.
Now, the theme is the issue.
And this not because some out there might decide to write without setting down a defined theme for their narrative.
I mean, it’s all right – each one defines his or her own technique.
No, what apparently bugs some readers is that a theme, for a genre story, is seen as superfluous or – even worse – as a Bad Thing.
This strangely widespread opinion is in part an anti-intellectual trend, in part a consequence of “message” having been used too often to justify bad storytelling.
And there’s also this weird idea that any writer defining a set of themes for his writing, is trying to push an ideology, or trying to sell something. Continue reading
“By 1937 almost 75 per cent of European trade was on a barter basis.”
Not bad, as a snippet of historical info, when you’re planning a story with a smuggler as the main character.
Researching historical details as background and framework for stories can be great fun.
In this case, it’s also long overdue.
When I was in high school, history stopped with the First World War.
This, for two main reasons
. the post-WWI history of our country is still a politically sensitive area
. post-WWI history is part of the second half of the last year, and it normally gets sacrificed to make room for more hours in the subjects that will be covered in the final exam. Continue reading
They say you can’t run a blog about your writing – or, indeed, about someone else’s writing – without a post about the ubiquitous dogma, the One to Rule Them All… Show Don’t Tell.
And who am I to snub traditions?
Show Don’t Tell is probably the most basic, simple tool in a writer’s toolbox.
I talk about tools and toolbox, and not about rules, because of this story, which many take as an undisputed truth, about rules being unbreakeable.
Now I don’t know how it is out there where you are sitting right now, but here where I am, there is a growing cult of this sho’dontell thing*.
Like most cults, this is based on an oversimplified and partial understanding of its central tenets.
And because this post is being written first and foremost for me, as a pro-memoria and as a way to set my thoughts straight, I am non interested here in finding the cult-leader, or laying the blame on this or that blogger, critic or writing guru.
What I would like to write, here, is the tool’s handbook, the pocket cheat sheet for the Show Don’t Tell utility. Continue reading
I watched a lot of adventure/fantasy/sf movies, when I was a kid, in the second half of the ’70s.
The two main venues, as far as I was concerned, were the church cinema, in the local parish, and the Cinema Colosseo (not bad as a name), two blocks away from my grandmother’s.
The parish cinema was a shoestring operation, put together by a young priest as a way to attract kids for the saturday evening service.
The deal was, you get the movie, then you go to mass.
Well, ok, it was a fair deal.
I used to skip church, but I did enjoy the movies: a weekly dose of Zorro, Tarzan, assorted Kaiju eiga, the occasional Sinbad adventure, quite a lot of dinosaurs. Continue reading
Lux Radio Theater offered radio adaptations of popular movies.
Here’s The Maltese Falcon, the classic proto-noir by Dash Hammett.
Edward G. Robinson plays Sam Spade – the role which was brought to the screen by Bogart.
Enjoy!
Karavansara 