Education

The 69 Pages of Writing Advice Denis Johnson Collected from Flannery O’Connor, Jack Kerouac, Stephen King, Hunter Thompson, Werner Herzog & Many Others

The internet is full of inspirational quotations about writing, many of them from accomplished and respectable writers. But what need could such writers have of inspirational quotations themselves? Surely true literary art flows from its authors without need of encouraging words, demand though it may sustained periods of labor, frustration, and even suffering. These days, more than a few who seek to create such art spend time studying not just its past masterworks but its living masters. “Some ...
Tags: Google, Facebook, Writing, College, Stephen King, Bob Dylan, Jesus, Akira Kurosawa, Johnson, Gore Vidal, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Seoul, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, Thompson

There Are Only 37 Possible Stories, According to This 1919 Manual for Screenwriters

"Great literature is one of two stories," we often quote Leo Tolstoy as saying: "a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town." That's all well and good for the author of War and Peace, but what about the thousands of screenwriters struggling to come up with the next hit movie, the next hit television series, the next hit platform-specific web and/or mobile series? Some, of course, have found in that aphorism a fruitful starting point, but others opt for different premises that number t...
Tags: Google, Facebook, Books, Writing, Film, College, America, Chicago, Rebecca, Seoul, Raymond Chandler, Leo Tolstoy, Social Network, Billy Wilder, Hill, Cecil B DeMille

Raymond Chandler’s 36 Great Unused Titles: From “The Man With the Shredded Ear,” to “Quick, Hide the Body”

For Chandler's birthday today. He was born on this day in 1888. via Chris Power Related Content: Raymond Chandler’s Ten Commandments for Writing a Detective Novel Hear Raymond Chandler & Ian Fleming–Two Masters of Suspense–Talk with One Another in Rare 1958 Audio Watch Raymond Chandler’s Long-Unnoticed Cameo in Double Indemnity   Raymond Chandler’s 36 Great Unused Titles: From “The Man With the Shredded Ear,” to “Quick, Hide the Body” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitte...
Tags: Google, College, Literature, Raymond Chandler, Facebook Twitter, Chandler, Chris Power Related Content, Raymond Chandler Ian Fleming

Raymond Chandler’s 36 Great Unused Titles: From “The Man With the Shredded Ear,” to “The Black-Eyed Blonde”

For Chandler's birthday today. He was born on this day in 1888. via Chris Power Related Content: Raymond Chandler’s Ten Commandments for Writing a Detective Novel Hear Raymond Chandler & Ian Fleming–Two Masters of Suspense–Talk with One Another in Rare 1958 Audio Watch Raymond Chandler’s Long-Unnoticed Cameo in Double Indemnity   Raymond Chandler’s 36 Great Unused Titles: From “The Man With the Shredded Ear,” to “The Black-Eyed Blonde” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitt...
Tags: Google, College, Literature, Raymond Chandler, Facebook Twitter, Chandler, Chris Power Related Content, Raymond Chandler Ian Fleming

The National Emergency Library Makes 1.5 Million Books Free to Read Right Now

The coronavirus has closed libraries in countries all around the world. Or rather, it's closed physical libraries: each week of struggle against the epidemic that goes by, more resources for books open to the public on the internet. Most recently, we have the Internet Archive's opening of the National Emergency Library, "a collection of books that supports emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation while universities, schools, training ...
Tags: Google, Books, Abc, College, US, United States, Internet Archive, Paris, Libraries, Army, Alvin Schwartz, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Albert Camus, Seoul, Kafka

10 Tips on How to Write a Great Screenplay from Billy Wilder: Pearls of Wisdom from the Director of Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity & More

Image via Wikimedia Commons There's an old story -- Orson Welles called it "the greatest Hollywood one-liner ever made" -- that when someone attending the 1958 funeral of Harry Cohn, the fearsome president of Columbia Pictures, asked how it was possible that such a huge crowd would show up for Cohn's funeral, Billy Wilder quipped: "Well, give the people what they want." The story is almost certainly apocryphal. The line may have been spoken by someone else, at a different Hollywood mogul's fune...
Tags: Google, Hollywood, Film, College, Germany, Orson Welles, Npr, Adolf Hitler, Cameron Crowe, Raymond Chandler, Billy Wilder, Don, Facebook Twitter, Tarkovsky, Paris Review, Wilder

Pulp Covers for Classic Detective Novels by Dashiell Hammett, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie & Raymond Chandler

Yesterday we wrote of the low opinions the eminent J.R.R. Tolkien and his friend C.S. Lewis held for the “vulgar” creations of Walt Disney. As a counterpoint to their disdain for popular entertainment, we might turn—as writer Steven Graydanus does in Disney's defense—to their contemporary, the Catholic apologist and prolific essayist, journalist, poet, and writer of detective novels and short stories, G.K. Chesterton. But we aren't talking Disney here, but hard-boiled pulp fiction, a genre I th...
Tags: Google, Books, College, Edgar Allan Poe, Disney, Raymond Chandler, Walt Disney, Jorge Luis Borges, Lewis, Brown, Facebook Twitter, J R R Tolkien, Romney, Josh Jones, G K Chesterton, Marshall McLuhan

Literary quiz 2016: Christmas in books and music

From Silas Marner to Shakespeare to Slade – brainteasers for the festive seasonWhich story begins with a Christmas goose being dropped in the street?Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Blue Carbuncle”Raymond Chandler’s The Big SleepCharles Dickens’s The Haunted ManIn which literary work does a man dressed as a woman fall in love with a woman dressed as a man at Christmas?In which literary work does a man dressed as a woman fall in love with a woman dressed as a man at Christmas?The Picture of Dorian GrayT...
Tags: Books, Music, Politics, UK, London, Education, World news, Culture, Charles Dickens, Harry, Grinch, Shakespeare, Raymond Chandler, Mary, Katy, Slade

Decoding the Screenplays of The Shining, Moonrise Kingdom & The Dark Knight: Watch Lessons from the Screenplay

“A screenplay isn’t meant to be read,” said no less a directing-screenwriting auteur than Stanley Kubrick. “It’s to be realized on film.” The quote comes up in “The Shining — Quietly Going Insane Together,” an episode of the video essay series Lessons from the Screenplay. Creator Michael Tucker uses it to explain his lack of access to the actual “shooting script” of the film, meaning the sort of script typically written before production and then more or less adhered to on set. But K...
Tags: Google, Christopher Nolan, Jack Nicholson, Writing, Film, College, Ray Bradbury, Los Angeles, Gotham, Roger Ebert, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Heath Ledger, Kubrick, Batman, Woody Allen

Hear Raymond Chandler & Ian Fleming–Two Masters of Suspense–Talk with One Another in Rare 1958 Audio

In the mid-20th century, the red-blooded reading man in America and Britain each had a character on whom he could rely to have vivid, in their separate ways exotic, and on a certain level somehow relatable adventures on the page: Philip Marlowe in the former, and James Bond in the latter. Raymond Chandler’s luckless Los Angeles private detective and Ian Fleming’s always impeccably kitted-out agent on Her Majesty’s Secret Service would seem at first to have little in common, but when their creato...
Tags: Google, Hollywood, London, College, America, Los Angeles, Bbc, Radio, Britain, James Bond, Ian Fleming, Literature, Secret Service, Jamaica, Sunday Times, Seoul

Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing & The Social Network) to Teach Online Course on Screenwriting This Summer

Sports Night, The West Wing, The American President, The Social Network — hardly shameful items to appear on anyone’s résumé. Sure, people disagree about the likes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and The Newsroom, but we’ve all got to admit that when Aaron Sorkin writes, he hits more than he misses, and even the supposed misses have more of interest about them than many others’ hits. How does this master of the modern American scene — its concerns, its personalities, its conversations, ...
Tags: Google, Television, Writing, Film, College, Aaron Sorkin, Los Angeles, The Newsroom, Oscar, Online Courses, Seoul, Raymond Chandler, Social Network, Aristotle, Billy Wilder, Werner Herzog