thoughtsignals

Jeri Rowe has a piece about a Greensboro writer still going strong at 92 — that is something to aspire to.

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Arthur C. Clarke, prolific writer, scuba diver, space enthusiast and inventor of the communications satellite, has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90.

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Madeleine L’Engle is dead. Another great one passes.

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Author Ray Bradbury says his landmark novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” is not about censorship.

Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

Link.

(via SF Signal)

Authors and book publishers are using quickly recorded audio books to whip up publicity for book sales, sometimes releasing the audio versions before the print version.

Because audiobooks are so fast, inexpensive and easy to record, the dynamic seems to be changing, with publishers looking to the audio format to fuel interest in paper books that aren’t quite ready for the printing press.

And with the ubiquity of iPods, that interest can be generated quickly: recordings need not be pressed onto CDs and packaged, but can quickly be uploaded to iTunes. Sometimes these recordings will be made with well-known authors whose next release isn’t quite ready for bookstores, and other times with newcomers like Ms. Fogarty whose work has gained a following another way.

Ms. Fogarty said that when she was first contacted by Ms. Winfrey’s show, she thought, “I’m going on ‘Oprah.’ Gosh, I wish my book were done.”

Fogarty is the source of the online Grammar Girl podcasts, which can be found here. Two fairly obvious observations about this:

1. Technology changes everything.

2. It’s a good thing that publishers are focused on marketing, rather than on silly things like whining about the disappearance of newspaper book sections.

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Creative writing teachers across the country are now trying to grapple with the question, more important than ever, of what to do when students write disturbing prose. You might think that you could somehow tell the truly disturbed students from those who merely want to be the next Stephen King. But maybe not.

“Lots of great literary works are deep and dark and disturbing — that would be Kafka,” says Deborah Landau, director of the creative writing program at New York University, who plans to discuss university protocol with her staff in the wake of Monday’s massacre. Yet teachers increasingly are being expected to distinguish between students’ pushing their creative boundaries or showing frightening warning signs. That’s a tall task, especially when students routinely hand in twisted texts dripping with bloodshed, cruelty, perversion and extreme sex scenes, say teachers.

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Greg Lindsay interviewed four magazine writers about the nuts and bolts of organizing and writing long stories. I very, very rarely write at the lengths he’s concerned with, but when I have I’ve always struggled with the process of organizing all that material.

Every journalist working above the metaphorical tree line of 2,500 words or so — where it’s hard to catch your breath and where telling the story demands scenes, dialogue, judicious compression, and philosophical expansiveness — must inevitably cross the chasm positioned squarely between reporting and writing. This is the point where everything that has been seen, heard, taped, and scrawled into notebooks must be reloaded into memory, weeks — even months — after the moments in question… and this critical point in the process is almost never discussed among journalists.

One tip I’m surprised wasn’t here: Write as you report — snippets of the story, different potential ledes, etc.

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One of the Poynter Institute’s Naughton Fellows, Pat Walters, is blogging “48 Tips in 48 Hours” from the National Writers Workshop in Hartford, Conn. I went to one of these workshops years ago in Charlotte, and it was quite good. Pat has nine tips up so far.

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p.s. Hey Poynter Institute — where’s the RSS feed?

For word buffs, a cool, long New York Times piece about what the editors at the Oxford English Dictionary do and how they do it. Among the tasty tidbits in this story is the word that means “a misheard lyric:” Mondegreen.

Link.