Are you begging? (72 hour read)

When I'm scrolling through my reader here on WordPress, I often see posts with a little parenthetic in the title like: (2 minute read). I'm trying to put a finger on why I almost never read these posts. I feel a resistance to click on them at all, when I see those. Unless the title …

Write about what you love?

I started reading IQ84 by Haruki Murakami recently, and one of the characters is a struggling writer. I am enjoying it quite a lot more than the previous Murakami novel I read, though it has a lot of similarities also. I wonder, though, how many writers write about writers? How many characters in novels are …

How would you describe it?

As a writing exercise, I often try to describe random objects or scenes that I see in my daily life. I don't type them out--just in my mind. But I try to come up with the words to put exactly what I'm looking at right then into someone else's head. How do I get across …

Predator in pathetic guise

I'm a bit more than halfway through Lolita, and am beginning to feel disturbed and disgusted. A slow, sickening feeling has been building for a while, and finally made me realize that Humbert is not a pathetic loser, but a cold predator. He is telling his story with the object of gaining sympathy. To do this …

write six billion stories

If you were an immortal, how many stories could you write before you got bored of the whole idea of stories? I can't imagine ever getting tired of making stuff up... but I suppose there must be a limit. Every thing that has ever happened, never happened, can't happen, or must happen--all are stories. How, with …