Jul 13 2010

Writers Create Masterpiece Also

flip-books

Who says that only visual artists such as painters and architects can make masterpieces that can astound us all? Even writers can do the same thing. The only difference is that writers make use of words and even simple illustrations to blow away the spectators which are mainly the readers. If you are really a good writer, there is no doubt that you can do such thing. You just have to make sure that you writer creatively and that you are also a versatile writer, meaning that you can write about anything at any given time. You need to be flexible. If you want to test how flexible or versatile you are as a writer, this is one test that you can do…write about something that is not common to many of us. If you can do that and you can get a good impression, it is an indication that you really are a good writer.

Why not try to write about proflix flip books? Have you heard about these? You might get the misconception that these are actual reading books but they are not. This kind of books refers to those photographs that are made tangible by the technology of electromagnets. This is actually an upgraded version of those things that are represented by electronic images. As we all know of it, when things are represented this way, we will not be able to hold or touch them. But with the use of the said technology, we can now have a seemingly hard copy of the image. It is such a beautiful subject for writing because it can be very catchy especially for those who are very much into reading articles about technology. It is about time you test yourself as a writer.


Jan 31 2009

The Changing Times and Words in Writing

English has tremendous fluidity. It readily adopts words from foreign languages, often without immediately “anglifying” their spellings or pronunciations. As Shakespeare so aptly demonstrated, English also allows words to be used as various parts of speech without any alteration of form. And English shapes itself differently each generation by accepting and rejecting popular usages and vocabulary. Writers should be ever aware of the changing nature of their artistic medium.

We have gradually taken to speaking in letters or acronyms rather than full words especially where technology has become ingrained in our everyday life and work. Companies have IT departments. We can communicate via IM. We connect our hardware with USBs. We spend millions on ISPs, DVDs, and MP3s. Such pseudo-words are common and acceptable in almost any modern context.

Technology has given us new functions for old words. Text, for example, is no longer just a noun. The sight of a mouse on a desk does not necessarily send a person running for traps. And the modern version of spam is far more universally hated than the canned pork of the same name. Again, readers are accustomed to and will readily accept these usage shifts.

For decades, stylebooks frowned upon the use of impact as a verb meaning “to affect,” insisting that, when used as a verb, it could only mean “to cause to stick or lodge.” Nowadays, these same manuals acknowledge that “to affect” is indeed a common and understood usage. Even the newest editions of both the layman-preferred Merriam-Webster and the linguist-revered Oxford English Dictionaries have included a number of modern terms that were unacknowledged or termed non-standard in previous editions.

In the past fifteen years or so, we have lost many of our problems only to have them replaced by issues. While stunning or incredible events in the eighties and nineties were often described as awesome, in this century they are more likely to be pronounced amazing. While not earth-shattering, generational lexical choices such as these bear thoughtful consideration because they can subtly date a person’s writing. For this reason, it may be advisable to choose traditional over modern word choices–or vice versa–depending on one’s intended audience.

English morphs in various ways. We writers would do well to weigh choices to determine which will work best for our audiences and, when necessary, edit accordingly.


Nov 1 2008

Anne Rice Goes from Vampires to Jesus Biographer

It’s Halloween, and Anne Rice has a new book — a memoir in fact — that’s climbing best-seller lists. Everything is normal, then. Normal if it were 1994 — the height of Rice’s megaselling fame as a queen of Southern Gothic pulp.

For those who haven’t been paying attention lately to vampire lit, America’s most famous chronicler of bloodsuckers doesn’t live in New Orleans anymore — and hasn’t since before Hurricane Katrina hit — and she’s riding new waves of enthusiasm: the memoir and Christian lit.

Her memoir, “Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession,” is the latest piece of evidence that Rice is reinventing herself in an attempt to build a reputation as a serious Christian writer.

In the memoir, the 67-year-old writer doesn’t disavow the two decades she spent churning out books on vampires, demons and witches — with a batch of S&M erotica thrown in — following the breakout success of her first novel in 1976, “Interview With the Vampire.”

But she’s clearly moved on.

In a telephone interview from her mountain home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., Rice laid out her goal:

“To be able to take the tools, the apprenticeship, whatever I learned from being a vampire writer, or whatever I was — to be able to take those tools now and put them in the service of God is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful opportunity,” she said. “And I hope I can redeem myself in that way. I hope that the Lord will accept the books I am writing now.”

The memoir follows the release of two books in a planned four-part, first-person chronicle of the life of Jesus.

And in this new 245-page memoir, Rice presents her former life as vampire writer as that of a soul-searching wanderer in the deserts of atheism; as someone akin to her most famous literary creations — Lestat, her “dark search engine,” Louis the aristocrat-turned-vampire and Egyptian Queen Akasha, “the mother of all vampires.”

“I do think that those dark books were always talking about religion in their own way. They were talking about the grief for a lost faith,” she said.

In 2002, Rice broke away completely from atheism — nearly four decades after she gave up her Roman Catholic faith as the 1960s started. It happened when she went off to college and found her peers talking about existentialism — Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre. Religion, she writes, was too restrictive to the young Rice. Too out of step.

Yet, religion had to come back into her life, she writes. For her, it was something she’d have to face up to again like an absent parent or a long-lost love child or Banquo the ghost in Macbeth.

By the late 1990s, when she went back to Mass, Rice — the author whose books sold in the tens of millions and who had recharged Hollywood’s appetite for vampire-inspired horror — had fallen on hard times.

Her husband, poet and artist Stan Rice, died of a brain tumor in 2002. And she had become victim to diabetes.

She writes that her return of faith was preceded by a series of epiphanies — many while on travels to Europe’s cathedrals, Israel and Brazil. In one episode, when she visited the giant Jesus statue above Rio de Janeiro, she writes that she felt “delirium” as the clouds broke and revealed the statue.

Her professed revelations recall the religious intoxication she describes of her childhood.

When she was 12, she had her father turn a room on the back porch of the family’s Uptown home in New Orleans into an oratory modeled after St. Rose of Lima — the saint Catholics believe turned roses into floating crosses. She wanted to be a saint, she writes.

In the memoir, Rice describes a familiar Catholic upbringing imbued with opulence and mystery. The incense. The statuary. The stained glass. The darkness. She learned the world, she writes, through her senses, through a “preliterate” understanding of the world. She writes that she possessed “an internal gallery of pictorial images” that, lamentably, was replaced “by the alphabetic letters” she learned later.

“You might call it the Mozart effect, but it was the Catholic effect on me,” she said.

In a sense, the memoir also is a confessional about her struggle as a writer to be a reader, a thinker and an author with a distinct literary style. Her stories often are reveries with no end in sight — and all too often ugly with pedantic unwinding, numbing in detail and overly simplistic, a pastiche of cliches.

Her turn in direction — from vampire fiction to Christian musings — still isn’t winning the critics over.

In The New York Times, Christopher Buckley slammed Rice’s memoir as “a crashing, mind-numbing bore. This is the literary equivalent of waterboarding.”

And the bar is high when it comes to writing about Jesus.

“The best may be Nikos Kazantzakis’ ‘The Last Temptation of Christ,’” said Jason Berry, a novelist and journalist who has written extensively on the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal. “But also (G.K.) Chesterton, Norman Mailer. … A lot of narrative artists in both literature and film have taken on Jesus, so to speak.”

Rice isn’t out to impress the critics, though.

“My objective is simple: It’s to write books about our Lord living on Earth that make him real to people who don’t believe in him; or people who have never really tried to believe in him,” she said.

She pressed the point: “I mean, I’ve made vampires believable to grown women. Now, if I can do that, I can make our Lord Jesus Christ believable to people who’ve never believed in him. I hope and pray.”

For her devotees, whatever she writes invariably goes down like a smooth bloodbath, that favorite Goth beverage sometimes made with raspberry liqueur, red wine and cranberry juice.

“There are so many people dedicated to her. They want her to write more vampire books,” said Marta Acosta, author of the popular “Casa Dracula” series, a “comedy of manners” that plays on vampire themes. She also runs the Vampire Wire, a book blog for fans of gore and the undead.

As for her, Acosta couldn’t care less if Rice sinks back into the vampire vein.

“People think it’s sexual, but it’s not. It’s suppressed stuff. Southern Gothic,” Acosta said. “How many centuries is Louis (played by Brad Pitt in the movie ‘Interview With the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles’) going to whine?”

Never again, it seems.

Rice is busy writing about Jesus as a minister. And that’s a tall order, Rice said.