Stuff for writers

I hope this post finds you writing … if not, here are a few things perfect for a little helpful procrastinating.

This post on The Elegant Variation offers advice for writers, which sort of segued into advice for the lovelorn — and shows how interchangeable the words love/writing can be when it comes to advice, from “Love should bother you” to “Every day you will have to recreate your love.”

And Janet Fitch offers 10 Rules for Writers on the LA Times blog — from killing cliches to stretching out your sentences for variety.

I enjoyed reading Charles Stross’s blog on being a working writer, with insights into what the full-time writing life is really like. It’s not all writing, all the time — “we work in bursts, and the rest of the time gets filled up with administrative junk and social fluff” — and the solitary nature of it can be trying –  “I have office-mates, but they’re not co-workers: at best they’ll stand on the keyboard and meow at me.” After outlining the drawbacks of this “wildly unstable, lonely occupation with an insane income spread” — Stross concludes that “it sucks,” a refreshingly honest conclusion about the true nature of writing as a full-time job.

Writers of fiction should check out this post on Alan Rinzler’s blog about how to eavesdrop to help with writing dialogue. I constantly assign fiction students to eavesdropping as a way to practice getting an ear for dialogue — and often they look at me rather strangely. So I loved seeing this post, which points out, first of all, that Norman Mailer did it (and not very subtly either), and offers tips and possible haunts for good listening.

I recently discovered StereoMood, which offers playlists for just about any type of mood (from energetic to sad to sexy) or activity (from cooking to road-tripping to making love) you can come up with. Readers and writers, check out its playlist for writing and playlist for reading.

And finally, I was initially intrigued by the idea of I Write Like, which (supposedly) matches your writing style with famous writers. At first, I was a little confused by the writers I was paired with, which I think would surprise most of my readers, too: I tested out excerpts from different stories and discovered that, apparently, I write like Chuck Palahniuk, David Foster Wallace, and/or Stephen King — all flattering comparisons, of course, but not at all what I’d expect. Oh, and my novel-in-progress is evidently in the style of Dan Brown. (Clearly, the excerpt I entered is a very rough first draft. And too bad this little algorithm isn’t measuring commercial potential.)

Naturally, I found myself wondering: Where are the women writers? So I tried a little experiment and pasted in excerpts of a few of my favorite writers to see what would happen. The results? According to this web site, Ann Patchett and Joan Didion both write like Kurt Vonnegut, Amy Hempel and Lorrie Moore write like Stephen King, Toni Morrison and Annie Proulx write like James Joyce, Jane Hamilton writes like Chuck Palahniuk, and Melanie Rae Thon writes like Vladimir Nabokov. Hmmm.