My lair

This blog contains me talking about my life, and the things I'm obsessed with. Also lust.

May 14, 2013 3:07 am

The Writing Process by Jane Espenson

In early December 2002, Jane Espenson—who by that time had written episodes for Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly—wrote an essay on the general process of writing a television episode for the official Firefly website on Fox.com. The original is archived here and is also reproduced below. Quick note: Kyle is a member of the Firefly Web Team.

Hello Kyle (Editor’s Note: and all you Mutant Enemy fans around the world)!

I’ve been asked to describe the writing process on a Joss Whedon show. I am primarily a Buffy writer, and I’m not in the Firefly writing room that often, but the general procedure is similar.

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12 notes

May 12, 2013 11:09 pm

"In my classes, we read great fiction obsessively, and then attempt to see how a writer managed to affect us. We try to understand which elements—diction, syntax, point of view and so forth—made us feel that way. After we spend several weeks reading this way, wondering how the author made us shiver like that, we try our own hand. I ask students to begin with ‘green lines,’ to isolate writing so good it makes one writer envious of another. Which parts do they wish they had written themselves? Students start to understand how their own writing works, where it ripples with energy… What they really want is to have some kind of firsthand, visceral relationship with a book—to see what it’s like to take a work apart and put it back together—using great stories as structural models, just the way the kids I grew up with in Detroit fell in love with cars by spending weekends trying to make derelict Ford Mustangs run again. When the engine finally starts, when you figure out how to make it fire, it’s an incredibly powerful learning experience."

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Dean Bakopoulos (via mttbll)

(via mttbll)

652 notes

April 16, 2013 2:48 pm

And there are millions of teens who read because they are sad and lonely and enraged. They read because they live in an often-terrible world. They read because they believe, despite the callow protestations of certain adults, that books-especially the dark and dangerous ones-will save them.

As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen King’s books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life.

And now I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons–in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.

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Sherman Alexie, Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood

(Source: thefirstgentleman, via dduane)

11,282 notes

April 4, 2013 12:23 pm

"I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—-the actual act of writing—-turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward."

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Anne Lamott (via dawnuh)

(Source: wordpainting, via dawnuh)

148 notes

March 31, 2013 12:18 pm

"[The] average daydream is about fourteen seconds long and [we] have about two thousand of them per day. In other words, we spend about half of our waking hours — one-third of our lives on earth — spinning fantasies."

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The Storytelling Animal – the science of how we came to live and breathe stories.

(Source: , via dawnuh)

16,385 notes

March 11, 2013 9:32 pm

(via daniiyall)

73,422 notes

February 25, 2013 6:30 pm

"I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head. Love is an illusion, but I would willingly fall for it if I could believe in it. Now everything seems either far and sad and cold, like a piece of shale at the bottom of a canyon - or warm and near and unthinking, like the pink dogwood."

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Sylvia Plath (via antimetab0le)

6 notes

February 22, 2013 1:10 pm

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February 20, 2013 7:09 pm

(Source: thepret-endisnear, via manicpixiebasednonbinary)

32,627 notes

writing

February 19, 2013 10:01 pm

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February 18, 2013 12:34 am

stephaniebing:

this fucking show

59 notes

January 26, 2013 12:16 pm

"No one cares if you write or not, so you have to. Your early work will probably be too earnest and overwrought and snarky, and you’ll try too hard to sound ironic and erudite, but if you keep at it, you will get better and better. I promise you this. And you will get to have the writer’s life, of writing, reading memoirs and journals of writers you admire, talking to other writers about process and discouragement and small victories, sharing your work at open mikes, traveling the world for material, learning to pay attention, trying and failing to get published, working as hard as you can at your craft, at honing your voice, at learning to tell your version of things in your truest voice … and you’ll get to be a writer. Maybe you’ll make a living at it, maybe you’ll always have to have a so-called real job. But no one knows if or why it will happen for you. So never give up."

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Anne Lamott