Short Film Friday: Smash and Grab

--Great Scifi Short from Pixar!

Images that Inspire

Quotes of the Week

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
—Somerset Maugham

When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.
—Stephen King

It seems that every time I stick my neck out, I get my foot into something else.
—Patsy Cline

This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.
—John Cleese

The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer.
—Steve Martin

Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.
—Jack London

If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story.
—Terry Pratchett

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.
—Neil Gaiman

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
—Mark Twain

Tuesday Tips: From Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Writing Tips:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Mmmmm pie...

10 Truths about Writing

Short Film Friday: Negative Space