I'm taking a simple survey with only one question: Has any current Orble blogger ever received the Blogging Scholarship?
Several of you have answered already, in response to my post about MetaFilter.Com, but just thought that maybe a few others might want to respond, as well, and perhaps were simply unaware that the question had been asked.
Would love to hear from anyone who has any input on this subject--but especially anyone who may have actually received one of these scholarships at one time or another. (I must admit, I'm beginning to feel that they might just be a figment of someone's imagination!)
Please, someone, prove me wrong!
Hopefully yours,
Jeanne
Thanks to all my readers for your patience in putting up with a bit of disorganization, uncertainty, and--for a while, at least--a lack of older blog post listings/archives on my new blog! We are now up and running, and will soon be able to resume posting lots of great--and hopefully very helpful--info for all the writers among us!
There are many, many resources out there in the cyber world that can enable us to reach our potential as writers and fulfill our dreams! Over the long term, I plan to hunt down as many of those resources as I can for the benefit of the wider community of writers--for writers of all types of content and with all manner of goals and aspirations for their writing.
In the meantime, please feel free to peruse some of my past posts, which contain some great resources, most of which are still current! Hopefully, you'll find something there that will help you along the road to your dreams!
Till next time,
Jeanne
Hope everyone will bear with me as I complete the move to my new domain here at WritersNotes.Net! The folks at Orble.Com, where I'm moving from, have promised to move my old blog posts over to the new site, and I'm sure they'll do so as soon as they can find a moment! With over 2,000 blogs at Orble, I'm sure they've got their hands quite full! I'm also waiting for their help and/or guidance in rearranging the items on my page into a more aesthetically pleasing configuration! So, things will get better, and your patience will be greatly appreciated!
If you simply can't resist checking out some of those old posts they have now been transferred to the new site!* I believe you'll find some very helpful resources here which will inspire, inform, encourage, and point you to potential markets for your work! And, for those who simply want to post their work on the Web--rather than making a business out of it--there are also some great non-paying or minimal-payment venues for showcasing your creativity!
So, whether you're a blogger, a poet, a fiction writer, a "how-to" guru, an informational afficionado, a writer of keyword content--or whatever your niche--you're bound to find something there that will help you along the path to meeting your goals and/or fulfilling your dreams! And, in the future, here at WritersNotes.Net, I plan to provide you with even more resources to help you succeed! If there's a particular area of interest you have that you'd like to see resources for in future posts, please don't hesitate to leave a comment and let me know! I want to be responsive to all my readers' writing-related needs!
Thanks so much for visiting!
Jeanne
*Updated after this post was written.
They say that everybody's a critic, and to a certain extent this is very true. And if true for the average person, it is even more so for the writer. To a writer, criticism is a fact of life! Those who might not be able to do any better themselves simply love to pick apart every paragraph...every sentence...every phrase...every word written--as long as it's written by someone else!
But, what else should a writer expect? After all, we, as writers repeatedly make ourselves vulnerable to the whims and caprices, the opinions and judgments, the beliefs, perspectives, and presuppositions of every individual who reads our work! By boldly putting our thoughts, ideas, feelings, and opinions out there for all the world to see...to evaluate..to weigh against their own experiences, their own feelings, and their own individual knowledge--as well as the wider body of knowledge, pseudo-knowledge, experience, and pure conjecture that surrounds us--we attract and even at times invite criticism.
But this is OK! We can take it--and hopefully we can at the same time learn not to take it to heart! Whatever their intent, our critics can teach us a great deal--as much about ourselves as they can about our work! If nothing else, they can teach us something about grace under fire...about turning the other cheek...about persevering despite all odds...and about transforming temporary failure into ultimate success!
So, let's say Thanks to critics everywhere! If nothing else, they give us the determination to keep trying...to continually challenge ourselves...to steadily improve our skills. And, if all else fails, they at least give us one possibly unintended gift: publicity!
Here are a few enlightening quotes by famous writers on critics and criticism:
A man must serve his time at every trade save censure--critics all are ready made. ~Lord Byron~
A dramatic critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned. ~George Bernard Shaw~
A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender. ~Jim Bishop~
Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good. ~P.G. Wodehouse~
Those who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write,
Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite. ~John Dryden~
The good critic is he who narrates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces. ~Anatole France~
Nature fits all her children with something to do,
He who would write and can't write, can surely review. ~James Russell Lowell~
Critic, n. A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him. ~Ambrose Bierce~
Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse will not hold. ~William Shenstone~
To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent. ~Nelson Algren~
A bad review by a man I admire hurts terribly. ~Anthony Burgess~
Time is the only critic without ambition. ~John Steinbeck~
I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise. ~Noel Coward~
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing the open sea. ~John Updike~
The main use in criticism is in showing the manner of man the critic is. ~Frank Moore Colby~
And, finally, this gem:
I never read a book before reviewing it. It prejudices me so. ~Sydney Smith~
Hope these quotations, from some of the best writing minds that history has produced have made you smile or chuckle...consider or reflect. I always find it fascinating to read the differing viewpoints of a whole array of writers on a single specific topic--and the more intricately related to the writing craft, the better!
Till next time,
Jeanne
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I was finally able to delete the duplicate posts from the blog! Hurray! For some reason, the software wouldn't allow me to do so last night. So, things are looking up! Now, all I need to do is get the web page properly formatted, and we'll be good to go!
Thanks for your patience!
Jeanne
My apologies for all the duplications of my first post! There seem to be a few glitches in the changeover between the two domains. Hopefully all this will be ironed out very soon!
Thanks for your understanding!
Jeanne
Writing provides tremendous opportunities--to have our voices heard, our ideas considered, our wisdom appreciated, our witticisms applauded. Whatever our individual writing goals may be, each of us pursues our own personal dream of what being a writer means to us; and as we do so, it often helps to know that there are others out there who are doing the same--others who, though they may be very different from us in so many other ways--are also, in that one special sense, very much the same.
This is my very first post at my new domain, and I hope to meet many new friends here. The aim of my Writer's Notes blog has, since its inception at Orble.Com, always been--and it always will be--to provide my readers with as much information, inspiration, and encouragement, and as many helpful resources as I am able to amass from a wide variety of sources to help you succeed in fulfilling your individual vision for your writing.
If you should visit before I have this site completely organized and properly configured, please bear with me. I will have things up and running--hopefully simply purring along--as soon as I possibly can. Here at WritersNotes.Net, I'm looking forward to a great experience interacting with my fellow writers, and I hope that each of you will glean many helpful tips, leads, ideas, and incentives from these pages that will equip you to move forward in both your craft and your business.
If you're visiting this page before all my previous posts have been moved over from the Orble.Com domain and you'd like to read them, you can find my original Writer's Notes blog at this link [Link inactivated. Posts moved to current site.]
Yours in the writing art,
Jeanne
Here are a few more quotes by writers on writing. Some are thought-provoking, some brutally honest, some inspiring, and some simply clever--but whatever your thinking about the art or the craft, you should find something here that will catch your fancy!
Here goes:
There is only one trait that marks the writer. He is always watching. It's a kind of trick of mind and he is born with it. ~Morley Callaghan~
Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book. ~Mickey Spillane~
Autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing. ~Quentin Crisp~
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can only be a footnote. ~Yevgeny Yevtushenko~
Books are...funny little portable pieces of thought. ~Susan Sontag~
I never desire to converse with a man who has written more books than he has read. ~Samuel Johnson~
Journalism is literature in a hurry. ~Matthew Arnold~
Literature is the question minus the answer. ~Roland Barthes~
Literature is recognizable through its capacity to evoke more than it says. ~Anthony Burgess~
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. ~G.K. Chesterton~
To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession. ~Robert Graves~
The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born. ~W.H. Auden~
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. ~Robert Frost~
It's easier to write a mediocre poem than to understand a good one. ~Montaigne~
In a poem the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind. ~Marianne Moore~
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings...in a man who has thought long and deeply. ~William Wordsworth~
You write by sitting down and writing. There's no particular time or place--you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he's disciplined, doesn't matter. ~Bernard Malamud~
I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark. ~Henry David Thoreau~
When I stop (working), the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm working. ~Tennessee Williams~
Words are loaded pistols. ~Jean-Paul Sartre~
Words are like leaves, and where they most abound,
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. ~Alexander Pope~
All the fun's in how you say a thing. ~Robert Frost~
The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne~
I do not understand this chronic illness. I wish I had gone to law school. ~Darryl Pinckney~
The best time for planning a book is when you're doing the dishes. ~Agatha Christie~
I talk out the lines as I write. ~Tennessee Williams~
If I could, I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results. ~Emily Bronte~
If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers. ~Irvin S. Cobb~
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. ~E. L. Doctorow~
Hope a few of these provocative thoughts have set your own creative juices flowing!
Happy writing!
Jeanne
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Writers, as a rule, tend to have a great deal to say about many subjects--and writing is no exception. Here are a few pearls of wisdom on the writing craft from some of history's most prolific authors:
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. ~Red Smith~
Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. ~Samuel Johnson~
A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. That is too much of a temptation to the editor. ~Ring Lardner~
Writing is a wholetime job: no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it. ~W. Somerset Maugham~
The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain WHATSOEVER on his habitually slack attention. ~Ezra Pound~
Better to write for yourself and have no public than write for the public and have no self. ~Cyril Connolly~
If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by people who move their lips when they're reading to themselves. ~Don Marquis~
In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give to your style. ~Sydney Smith~
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short. ~Henry David Thoreau~
There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers. ~H.L. Mencken~
You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved. ~Tracy Kidder~
The wastepaper basket is the writer's best friend. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer~
When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be till I'm under way. I trust inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day. ~Alberto Moravia~
It's not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them. ~T. S. Eliot~
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. ~Mark Twain~
The secret of good writing is to say an old thing a new way or to say a new thing an old way. ~Richard Harding Davis~
Well, dear Aspiring Writer, now that you've read all this practical advice, all these clever witticisms, and all these words of inspiration penned by wordsmiths who have actually accomplished what you may only dream of, there's only one thing left for you to do if you'd like to join their ranks: WRITE!
Literarily Yours,
Jeanne
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