May we all have a chance to help someone.
Filed under 2022, writing tip, Writing Tip Wednesday
Date: June 10 -15, 2018 at Hollins University in Roanoke, VA. Details at www.hollins.edu/tmww.
From novice to advanced. Since 2005, Tinker Mountain Writers has been nuturing and empowering writers though workshops in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
Filed under 2018, writing tip, Writing Tip Wednesday
Two writers who didn’t like each other met in a bar, as such writers often do. Each claimed it was his favorite bar and each claimed he had found it first. After several months of glowering at each other and bad mouthing each other, they agree to settle the matter with a duel of puns.
Since the short writer won the seventh round, the tall writer was allowed to go first for round eight. A set of cards was placed on the table between them, face down. On each card was a subject. The tall writer flipped the card over and the subject was “victim.”
Props were allowed, and for each turn, each writer could make one phone call.
Each writer had to say his pun and the audience would get to pick which one they preferred. The bartender, a waiter, and a waitress would be the judges as to who got the loudest groan.
After thinking a moment, the tall writer asked for a cup of coffee. It took a moment, but when it arrived, he gripped the handle and held it up. “Coffee is the silent victim our house. It gets mugged every day.”
This immediately drew a long moan from the crowd, then a few laughs.
“Until you multiply yourselves times the speed of light squared. Then you be energy.”
The short writer waited until things were quiet, then he said, “Two egotists started fighting. It was an I for an I.”
The crowd hesitated, then groaned, twice, and somebody laughed.
It was close, but round eight went to the tall writer. The short writer now had 3 wins, 3 losses, and 2 ties.” The tall writer also had 3 wins, 3 losses, and 2 ties.
Filed under 2017, Monday morning writing joke
Why crime fiction is leftwing and thrillers are rightwing
Today’s crime novels are overtly critical of the status quo, while the thriller explores the danger of the world turned upside down. And with trust in politicians nonexistent, writers are being listened to as rarely before
by Val McDermid
I spent the weekend in Lyon, at a crime writing festival that feted writers from all over the world in exchange for us engaging in panel discussions about thought-provoking and wide-ranging topics. They take crime fiction seriously in France – I was asked questions about geopolitics, and the function of fear. I found myself saying things like “escaping the hegemony of the metropolis” in relation to British crime writing in the 1980s.
What they are also deeply interested in is the place of politics in literature. Over the weekend, there were local elections in France, and a thin murmur of unease ran through many of the off-stage conversations with my French friends and colleagues. They were anxious about the renaissance of the right, of the return of Nicolas Sarkozy, the failure of the left and the creeping rise of the Front National.
As my compatriot Ian Rankin pointed out, the current preoccupations of the crime novel, the roman noir, the krimi lean to the left. It’s critical of the status quo, sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly. It often gives a voice to characters who are not comfortably established in the world – immigrants, sex workers, the poor, the old. The dispossessed and the people who don’t vote.
The thriller, on the other hand, tends towards the conservative, probably because the threat implicit in the thriller is the world turned upside down, the idea of being stripped of what matters to you. And as Bob Dylan reminds us, “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”
Of course, these positions don’t usually hit the reader over the head like a party political broadcast. If it is not subtle, all you succeed in doing is turning off readers in their droves. Our views generally slip into our work precisely because they are our views, because they inform our perspective and because they’re how we interpret the world, not because we have any desire to convert our readership to our perspective.
Except, of course, that sometimes we do.
Rest of the article: http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/apr/01/why-crime-fiction-is-leftwing-and-thrillers-are-rightwing?CMP=share_btn_fb
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A counterpoint:
Thrillers are politically conservative? That’s not right
Val McDermid says that while crime fiction is naturally of the left, thrillers are on the side of the status quo. Jonathan Freedland votes against this reading
by Jonathan Freedland
Quickfire quiz. Identify the following as left or right. Big business? On the right, obviously. Trade unions? Left, of course. The one per cent? That’d be the right. Nicola Sturgeon? Clearly, on the left. If those are too easy, try this literary variant. Crime novels: right or left? And what about thrillers: where on the political spectrum do those belong?
Val McDermid, undisputed maestro of crime, reckons she knows the answer. Writing earlier this week, she argued that her own genre was rooted firmly on the left: “It’s critical of the status quo, sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly. It often gives a voice to characters who are not comfortably established in the world – immigrants, sex workers, the poor, the old. The dispossessed and the people who don’t vote.”. Thrillers, by contrast, are inherently conservative, “probably because the threat implicit in the thriller is the world turned upside down, the idea of being stripped of what matters to you.”
I understand the logic. You can see how McDermid’s own novels, like those of, say, Ian Rankin – another giant in the field, whom she cited as an ally in this new left/right branding exercise – do indeed offer a glimpse into the lives of those too often consigned to the margins, those power would prefer to ignore. But does that really go for all crime writing, always? If it does, someone forgot to tell Miss Marple.
Still, my quibble is not really with McDermid’s claim that the crime novel leans leftward. I want to object to the other half of her case: that the thriller tilts inevitably towards the right. As someone who is both a card-carrying Guardian columnist and a writer of political thrillers, I feel compelled to denounce the very idea.
Sure, there are individual stars of the genre who sit on the right. Tom Clancy was an outspoken Republican (though even his most famous creation, Jack Ryan, was ready to rebel against a bellicose US president for meddling in Latin America). But Clancy’s conservatism is more the exception than the rule.
Consider the supreme master of the spy thriller, John le Carré. His cold war novels stood against the mindless jingoism of the period, resisting the Manichean equation of east-west with evil-good. In the last decade, Le Carré has mercilessly exposed the follies of the war on terror, probing deep into the web of connections that ties together finance, politics and the deep state. The older he gets, the more Le Carré seems to be tearing away at the establishment and its secret, complacently amoral ways.
Rest of the article: http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/apr/03/thrillers-politically-conservative-val-mcdermid-crime-fiction-jonathan-freedland
Filed under 2015, writers on politics, Writers on writing
Q.: What do you call five writers marching in a single line through a war zone?
A.: A writers’ column
Filed under Monday morning writing joke
Q.: What do you call a cab with three writers stuck in traffic while on the way to a writing conference?
A.: Writers blocked.
Filed under Monday morning writing joke
Two fifty-five-year-old authors were sitting together on a dais at a writer’s conference.
The first one looks at the photo and short biography of the third author who is scheduled to join them.
“Wow,” the first author says, “I must be getting old.”
“Why?” the second asks, “because she looks so young in the photo?”
“No. Because she says she’s twenty-seven and describes herself as middle-aged.”
“Yeah,” the second author sighs, “middle age is looking younger and younger to me, too.”
***
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
–Mark Twain
Filed under Monday morning writing joke
Detroit-Based "Write A House" Awarding Free, Permanent Houses To Writers.
Maybe this will catch on in other cities.
Filed under writers
Two writers are sitting at a bar, as writers are sometimes want to do.
One writer sips his drink and says, “I’m thinking of make a run for the U.S. Congress. If I do, will you vote for me?”
The other writer puts down his drink and says, “No.”
The first writer hesitates, looking visibly taken aback, but then asks, “Why not?”
The other writer says, “Because I already know all your lies.”
Filed under Monday morning writing joke
Booker's Blog 