<big><big>NanoWriMo!!!</big></big> (ibid.) |
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Only two weeks to the starting line! The BIC HOK TAM! ...but I’m outa sound effects. If November is not yr best month for ambitions, join us in probably-January for DailyKosWritingMonth, open to poets, philosophers, translators, essayists, memoirists, itinerists, songwriters, and friends.
Now, in a moment we’ll proceed to the WriteOn topic of the evening. Just first, I have a question: is anyone here interested in the idea of a group for posting short-stories, chapters of novel[la]s, and/or poetry, maybe even memoir, in each of which would go a boiler plate more or less like this:
If you enjoy reading this, please click on the most recent Community Needs List diary, and see if you can kick in a coupla bucks to help someone there. |
Potential fiction/poem/memoir/etc posters would need to keep in mind 4 things: [1] only official staff writers in DK have any real copyright protection here, so if yr intellectual property was ripped off —by kosak or by outside reader— there might be little to nothing you could do about it. BETTER DETAIL & MAYBE LESS WORRY IN FUTURE MENTIONS ON THIS IF A GRP MATERIALIZES [2] literary agents don’t much try to sell to publishers anything that’s already been in teh interwebs.IBID [3] Memoirists need to be careful to edit out information about selves that should not be spread ‘round the internet; [4] Commenters can be jerks about creative writing.
So, all you’re likely to get out of it is a tad more exposure for yr oeuvre, and a good feeling about trying to help people stuck in hard times, with no assurance anyone will in fact benefit. But no one can make you read or reply to comments, so you could save yrself that annoyance, at least. ...Thoughts, anyone?
Now, back to our regular programming! You probly know that before All the President's Men (nonfic 1974, ) there was All the King's Men (1947 fiction Pulitzer), a politically-set book “so charged with dramatic tension it almost crackles with blue sparks, ...so drenched with fierce emotion, narrative pace and poetic imagery that its stature as a 'readin' book', as some of its characters would call it, dwarfs that of most current publications."
That, with a title from a nursery rhyme. (My favorite Cary Grant movie is Father Goose.)
”DUDLEY, THERE IS NO TOMORROW!"; "THEN HOW ABOUT THIS AFTERNOON?” (1963) still makes me laf just remembering the title. Other works by the author include How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and the 18 June 1964 WSJ quoted him,
"Not even computers will replace committees, because committees buy computers." —Shepherd Mead
When Harry Kemelman’s first David Small mystery came out, bookstores and libraries got flooded with requests for “Freddy the Rabbit Slept Late”, but everyone figured it out eventually, and the series did nicely.
Clearly, some titles are clear on what the book, film. or TV series (or etc) are/is about. Other times, it takes reading/viewing to find out what’s the title’s meta phor: The Big Chill isn’t what happens to your head when you suck a snowcone too fast; neither is The Iceman Cometh.
At a political speech a friend and I were forced to attend decades ago, we almost got thrown out for causing laughter (Drat! That close!) when I murmured skeptically “who's got the pain when they do the mambo?” That was from a song in Damn Yankees, and I’d forgotten all about the time it came in handy, until seeing the recent Fosse/Verdon tv series. What’s Fosse/Verdon about? Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse. What’s Damn Yankees about?
Two lost souls
Onna highway a life
They don’t even got
A sista or brotha
But ain’t it just great
And ain’t it just grand
[take a breath, 2 beats]
…. they got each otha!
So, now you know if you didn’t. Oh, and it’s also about baseball. ⚾ And being careful what you wishfa.
Speaking of rabbits, what otha story might there be if a novel was entitled Watership Down (1972) but wasn’t about wild English hares on the loose? I kinda cotton to a tale involving, say, a near-global drought not long in future, when a billionaire’s armed tanker plane full of priceless liquid cargo veers inexplicably off course, and off radar, into terra incognita...
Speaking occupationally, might the The Italian Job (1969) be a title useful for a remake of Mystic Pizza (1988)?
The CHALLENGE⁉️
- a variation on that thing we often do, of writing a paragraph with a coupla odd words from the dictionary, or prompts from a site strawbale mentioned called something like write.com (?).
BUT instead of using something from the list (below) IN a vignette, make it the name of a yarn that’s not the story it’s already a title of (if it is): tell us what’s the general plot or problem, or the situation/setting. Or opening lines that clue the reader in how the title applies.
(BTW, the title could be the heading of a chapter in yr WIP, if you’d prefer.)
Use your WIP characters, or past ones, or Callow Youth & Stout Companion & the rest of the Togwogmagog crew … or clever heroine Belinda whose darling Lord Postlethwaite-Praxleigh (pronounced Puppy) left the ballroom on the arm of her rival, Adelaide; or doughty mercenary soldier Wallace Higginbotham, drawn to losing causes; or ace dragon breeder Jocasta Entwhistle, suspicious of any buyers who might not give her dragonets the best forever-home; or intrepid private investigator Celia Spunk, prowling noirnia’s rain-slick streets in search of the Chainsmoke Killer; or Goodwife Thankful Goodheart, feeding her hens and minding her own business as Agnes Addlepate starts trouble in the village; or international superspy James Buns, and the unfortunately-named girlfriend tirelessly rescuing him from the lethal toils of eccentric megalomaniacs; or detective Scotty Blaine so incorruptible even the mob boss trusts him to tell the truth …. or you can always just invent new characters. Your choice!
: )
If you’d like to tell it from a POV different than as author, maybe you’re the agent pitching a client’s story to a publisher, film producer, video/online-game manufacturer, or tv studio — make that sale! Or maybe you’re the publishing employee who writes the blurb on the front dust-cover flap of a hardback, or the back of a paperbound book. Or maybe you’re a reviewer. (For a high-concept pitch, you’d keep it to as few words as possible; for a review, the skirt-hemline principle obtains: short enough to be interesting but long enough to cover the subject.)
Here’s your list of titles to make something new from. As the old TV commercial goes, take two, they’re small! Or more, at your pleasure. Or just the one that most tickles your fancy — it’s all good:
One O'Clock Jump 🔵 Twelve O'Clock High 🔵 deliver the goods 🔵 The Little Prince 🔵 give it time 🔵 Casablanca 🔵 speak of the devil 🔵 She 🔵 half the battle 🔵 The rest is silence 🔵 crossroads 🔵 2001 🔵 failing all else 🔵 Four score and seven 🔵 go-cup 🔵 The jubjub bird and the frumious bandersnatch 🔵 a case of scotch 🔵 Tell it slant 🔵 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 🔵 Let them eat cake 🔵 Charlotte's Web 🔵 Are you now or have you ever been 🔵 bull fiddle 🔵 Sired by a hurricane 🔵 acid test 🔵 60 Minutes 🔵 the devil his due 🔵 a ninth Wave 🔵 ground rules 🔵 The Buena Vista Social Club 🔵 wit's end 🔵 quick change artist 🔵 just be a minute 🔵 Babylon 5 🔵 Gone With the Wind. 🔵 Three Little Maids from School 🔵 wide place in the road 🔵 doll baby 🔵 gift horse 🔵 back against the wall 🔵 Read–write conflict 🔵 cut to the quick 🔵 Why does Rice play Texas? 🔵
Or some other common phrase or title, from anywhere — Feel free! What’s the story, morning glory?
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