Category Archives: Writing

A film to watch: Julie & Julia

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A few days ago I was able to watch the film Julie and Julia. The movie tells the tale of Julia Child and Julie Powell . Powell a writer who seemed to be getting frustrated at her life started blogging. Her blog The Julie/Julia Project chronicled a challenge she set up for herself- to cook over 524 recipes from Julia Child’s book – Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1st Edition, 1961, written by Louisette Berthole, Simone Beck and Julia Child ).With Each effort and enterprise to be posted on Julie’s blog, In between the triumph and defeat of Julie the film also tells the story of how Julia Child became a writer and how the book came to be. It is the story of Julie and Julia.

The film’s script was adapted by Nora Ephron from two books: (i) My Life in France, Child’s autobiography, written with Alex Prud’homme, and (ii)Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell.

The film is light and entertaining, Julia and Julie’s adventures are poignant with little or even just a pinch of pathos, Just enough to ground one with the story without being overwhelmed. In short it is a film about real people.

And it is an eye-opener as well. Writing online and offline is something that requires consistent and hard work plus a little bit of luck, It is shown in the film. In the film the writing process took years and years of hard work, misadventures for Julia Child. And for Julie Powell it seemed to have been a roller coaster ride but an interesting experience as well. And it also shows how the Internet – blogs in particular – have changed the publishing world.

It is a movie that takes a look at a the writing life of America’s foodie Icon and her American foodie fan – a blogger. It is entertaining and illuminating. The movie will be a delight for foodies. Writers and bloggers without doubt.

Enjoy watching the film: Bon Appétit!

Originally posted on September 28, 2009 @ 5:52 pm

The Fact Checker’s Bible

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If you have time please go to your local library or book store and look for Sarah Harrison Smith’s The Fact Checker’s Bible. Incidentally, in Spanish the library is called La Biblioteca and the book store La Libreria. Anyway, for writers and bloggers this is quite a helpful book but I think more for bloggers.

Why?

Well Bloggers are not only writers but also the editor, photographer and publisher of the blog.

Smith discusses in the detail and argues for the practice of fact checking in writing, editing and publishing.

Why is fact checking important?

A factual error can be significant or insubstantial. Significant – A writer may stray from the facts when doing report or doing a commentary piece. And it compromises the article/post and might even open the author and the publisher to legal action. Insubstantial – Could be an error in time, place or even gender.

There are probably two effects or outcome brought about by errors:

First, It opens the writer and publisher (both roles played by blogger) to legal action and censure.

Second, It makes the reader more cynical. Your authority and reputation as a writer and publisher (Blogger) will be dimimished. One expects and should not be surprised by skepticism from the readers. But to accumulate skepticism in your readers is bad news.

The book is The Fact Checker’s Bible: A Guide to Getting it Right by Sarah Harrison Smith.

Originally posted on August 30, 2009 @ 11:23 pm

Thinking Differently: Childhood Imagination Reminders

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My background and interest in writing started out due to my wild imagination. I used to love writing short, fictional stories about super heroes, alien races, and immortals. I believe that this imagination, while maybe not as strong today, helped my writing, and solidified me as a decent blogger early on in my career.

When I am in a slump with my writing, I take some time to think back to when I was younger and imagine the things I used to imagine. When on car rides, I used to pretend there was a superhero like ninja running along side of the car, using trees, telephone polls and vehicles on the road to keep up with the car that I was in. I used to imagine that a Star Trek shuttle crash landed in my back yard after traveling back in time, and who, of my friends, I would pick up to create my small crew and what I would do with such advanced technology.

Holding on to these fantasies help me keep my imagination alive, and see things differently than others around me. It also helps me step out from the current situation, and any emotional bias I might have and look at things rationally, as though I would be unaffected by any conclusion I came up with.

I suggest that everyone trying to build a career in blogging take time to think back to when you were younger, your dreams, passions, and fantasies and hold on to them, as I have found getting older gives very little time for such creativity.

Your writing will be better for it.

Originally posted on September 13, 2008 @ 6:40 pm

Creating a Post: Mindmapping

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One of the first things I do when coming up with a post is to open up my favourite text editor and write down some thoughts. Usually, they end up being for a variety of posts, rather than a single post, but once I find myself done writing out my immediate thoughts and ideas, I go back and ask questions about each main point.

Ask yourself what would you like to know if you were reading about the subject? Can it be broken into sub-questions that you can answer? What keywords do you think the article should have? What is your target audience? Does it answer some if not all of the traditional “who, what, where, when, why and how”?

A good example is something broad like “blogging software”. You can write questions like:

  • what software do I use?
  • what is my favourite software?
  • what are the advantages of each package I know something about?
  • who are the authors of the different software?

Keep growing out the points you have for your article until there are around nine or so main points. Start reading back over the points and making sentences out of them, write down more questions as you think of them, do a one or two sentence answer on each of the questions you come up with. Build sentences around the keywords you want in the article. Don’t worry about format, flow, or even the rules of the english language. This is all about generating content and ideas, not getting ready to publish a fully formed idea.

The more keywords, questions, and sentences you can come up with, the easier the total article will be when you do finally compose it.

I don’t know how many times that jotting down a variety of words, thoughts and questions have made my blog posting life easier, especially now that I have written more than ten thousand posts in my blogging history.

Originally posted on April 19, 2008 @ 10:22 pm

Do You Read More Than You Write?

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One of the issues that I have is my obsession with learning new things. This obsession leads me to subscribe to way too many blogs in hopes of finding great things that inspire me to write, but it also takes away the time I have for writing. At one point, I was spending half of my day reading a variety of RSS feeds in Bloglines.

I have since cut that down and can go through my daily read list in around an hour or two, but when you add on the forums I participate in, the social networks, and things like Twitter, I am back reading more than writing.

Reading can be a great source of inspiration and content, but I find that living my life, exploring my interests, and disconnecting from my normal routine makes me much more productive than the days where I ingest content all day until I am so overloaded with information, I can’t remember things that happened two minutes ago.

If you are recovering from St. Patrick’s Day partying, and you have the option to get off work early and just recharge and relax, I suggest you use it. Get out of your normal routine, disconnect from the Internet and put pen to paper or fingers to notepad, and just crank out some new, original, interesting posts.

Originally posted on March 18, 2008 @ 12:33 pm