Mel's Forum?

"If you love something, give it away."

What is the criteria to make a statement quotable?

Does one have to achieve a certain level of fame to be quoted?

I believe there are things said by ordinary people, words that contain wisdom, that are worthy of quoting.

If we were to read Carol or Dick's posts, we would find things worthy of quoting. At the same time, why must we wait for someone to die before we recognize their wisdom?

“I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have,
beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser
than oneself. “ Marlene Dietrich

Abe,

Because we are unwise in that regard.
It is sad.

I like your "Whatever the question, love is the answer. It's the greatest force in the Universe."

Quote :

one click on the lupus forum soon nips that forums are for fun conjecture in the bud..." replied the goblin, where there were many very real and serious forums out there, adding ...and you can't converse with a book,

Goblin, you're missing the point. Yes, serious subjects are discussed on forums, and yes, they're interactive, which a book isn't. So? It's not either/or. I don't get paid for posting on forums, and I don't get off by posting in a particular style on hundreds of forums, as you obviously do. I don't care if I make an "internet presence" -if I did, I'd put my name and links to my books in my sig. And I'm not going to find whole, great information and stories like what I recently bought below on any forum. I don't count free chapters of fantasy crap on some unpublished writer's blog as worth reading. If that's all we end up with because publishing is on a decline, the velocity of our dumbing-down is going to increase with lightning speed.

Shelagh wrote:

I agree. I wrote a small blog post, Is Writing Replacing Reading? that received a great response (much better than any of the blog posts about books) on Literature & Fiction:

http://shelaghwatkins.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/is-writing-replacing-reading/

Well said!

LC,

You are wise. The last thing writers want to buy is a book. They want to write and sell not, buy and read.

You can't get them to support each other either. When Dick passed Jackie wanted us to give his Normandy book to the library. I wonder how many were given?

My guess is one.

LC wrote:

If that's all we end up with because publishing is on a decline, the velocity of our dumbing-down is going to increase with lightning speed.

Unfortunately, we cannot stop the dumbing down. In the past, letter writing was common, but it is a dying form of communication. People have more leisure time than ever before and yet less inclination to correspond by land mail. Everything has to be instant.

Yes, Alice, book buyers are on the decline and book writers on the increase.

Dear Alice,
You have finally said it. Writers who are not famous do not want to read, they are focused on their own book, if anyone should want to read it, buy it ........

That hope to be appreciated for your words is intense, it means validation as a person who has something to add to this flow that is living.

Back in the days when I read Walden II by BF Skinner, the theory being that everyone could be controlled by positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement did not work quite so well but it was still a powerful force in Mr. Skinner's opinion. Children should be incarcerated into Skinner Boxes from their birth and thereby grow up with the social values that were condoned by society from birth by either rewarding the desired behavior or punishing undesirable behavior. I imagined that there were a lot of parents who thought that their children were human beings and deserved better than that. I was one of them. But that was purported as sound parenting back then when I was just getting a grip on being a parent. No one knew how to be a parent. It was a hit and miss of love doing what instructions would not.

The point being that balderdash sells. It always has and has always been endorsed by high mucky mucks in the educational falderol.



Love,
Betty

These days, no one would give BF Skinner the time of day. He sold a lot of books with that balderdash.

What is the new balderdash?

Love,
Betty

226/2011

Betty..

The new thing today is " SEX, " " POLITICS !"
Which I refuse to write about, I wonder if
people read normal stories, I love reading
gardening books, biographies....Anyone doing
their biography yet ?
Cheers..Joe

B F Skinner and behaviorism in general - balderdash. Betty, you use the most wonderful words.

Behaviorism - like Pavlov's dog, who was conditioned to salivate whenever it heard a bell ringing.

Bet Pavlov didn't know Wooffer, or Dusty,or Susan's cat, Grizabella, who would stay with me while Susan was out and managed to lead me around like I was on a leash.

Even so, dogs and humans are different (not better/worse). Our cerebral cortex is bigger and more differentiated, for better or worse.

The force of behaviorism started to crumble with the Berlin wall and perestroika. Now we see something similar happening in the Middle East. We are more than the sum of our parts. We resist conditioning. We are waking up.

I think that is what internet writing is about. I think that is why, right now, more people are writing their own thoughts and reading the thoughts of others less.

I wonder what Titian would have thought of Picasso, God forbid Jackson Pollock.

"Commercial" fiction is boring, because there is no surprise. Everything follows a predictable pattern. "Commercial" publishers are insisting that the pattern, the familiarity, is what the readers want. But fewer people are reading it. We can satisfy our need for stories better by writing our own. They are at least original. We aren't exactly salivating by the bell these days. We are making up our own minds, writing our own stories.

Once a student told me (very smugly) he had read every book that Louis L'Amour had written. i couldn't handle the smugness. I told him that I - and this is true - had read all of Louis L'Amour's books myself, while my children were small, because he was the only author I knew of that I could read with one eye and watch kids with the other without losing anything. (I know, bad form for a teacher, but he really was being insufferably smug. And yes, maybe I was projecting; I've been accused of being a bit on the smug side myself.) But I still like the first seven or eight of L'Amour's books that I read. After that, I had the pattern down so pat that I could predict what was going to happen next.

Mark David Gerson recently asked to be my Facebook friend. We have a few friends in common, and I am a fan of his work, but I suspect that maybe he read Forever Travels. It's the only thing I can think of. Here is something he wrote in The Voice of the Muse: "Even if no one else sees or reads [what you write], it has been published. It has been given a physical life it never had before. And just as every action in the universe has an impact on every being in that universe, or so our quantum scientists would have us believe, your words made manifest will have their effect."

The last words (before the epilogue, anyway), of another of my favorite and most inspiring books, Richard Bach's Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, are: "Everything in this book may be wrong."

So, maybethe quantum scientists and postmodern thinkers are wrong, and we don't co-create our reality. Maybe we are not all part of a connected, organic universe. Maybe that is the latest balderdash.

But, I'm betting it isn't. I'm betting that, in time, the quality writing will pan out, like the gold dust in the prospector's sluice box, and like the cream that rises to the top of the milk pail.

In the meantime, we have our forums and blogs, and once in a while, a Julie Powell gets a book deal and a major movie.

We can only take each day as it comes and do what is in front of us to do.

Ann

alice wrote:

LC,

You are wise. The last thing writers want to buy is a book. They want to write and sell not, buy and read.

Any writer who doesn't read is doing it wrong.

zizban wrote:

alice wrote:

LC,

You are wise. The last thing writers want to buy is a book. They want to write and sell not, buy and read.

Any writer who doesn't read is doing it wrong.

Ah, Chris, but doing it right depends on what you read.

Ann

alj wrote:

zizban wrote:

alice wrote:

LC,

You are wise. The last thing writers want to buy is a book. They want to write and sell not, buy and read.

Any writer who doesn't read is doing it wrong.

Ah, Chris, but doing it right depends on what you read.

Ann

Explain.

zizban wrote:

alj wrote:

zizban wrote:

alice wrote:

LC,

You are wise. The last thing writers want to buy is a book. They want to write and sell not, buy and read.

Any writer who doesn't read is doing it wrong.

Ah, Chris, but doing it right depends on what you read.

Ann

Explain.

The quality of your writing will be proportionate to the quality of what you read. It doesn't matter what format you read from.

Ann

alj wrote:

zizban wrote:

alj wrote:

zizban wrote:

alice wrote:

LC,

You are wise. The last thing writers want to buy is a book. They want to write and sell not, buy and read.

Any writer who doesn't read is doing it wrong.

Ah, Chris, but doing it right depends on what you read.

Ann

Explain.

The quality of your writing will be proportionate to the quality of what you read. It doesn't matter what format you read from.

Ann

Ah, yes. I agree.

Quote :

Quote :

one click on the lupus forum soon nips that forums are for fun conjecture in the bud..." replied the goblin, where there were many very real and serious forums out there, adding ...and you can't converse with a book

Goblin, you're missing the point. Yes, serious subjects are discussed on forums, and yes, they're interactive, which a book isn't. So? It's not either/or. I don't get paid for posting on forums, and I don't get off by posting in a particular style on hundreds of forums, as you obviously do. I don't care if I make an "internet presence" -if I did, I'd put my name and links to my books in my sig. And I'm not going to find whole, great information and stories like what I recently bought below on any forum. I don't count free chapters of fantasy crap on some unpublished writer's blog as worth reading. If that's all we end up with because publishing is on a decline, the velocity of our dumbing-down is going to
increase with lightning speed.

"...ah now, I like that post, proves you've been holding back on us, even if I feel the truth to be the opposite, in that, walk into any bookshop and it's the publishing world has lots of fastbuck books by crap authors, whereas forumland, because it has no financial incentive, leaves readers to make their own choices upon the merit of what one is reading, and so no, this is not dumbing down, for you only have to look at the posts on this thread alone to see if anything our minds are sharpened by our mudslinging, whoops, corresponding then..." mentioned the goblin, adding "...but you are right though, I did see my mother, for all her wealth and ability, go mentally inactive and socially disengaged just like so many other old folks like her, till she drowned alone in merlin's cave, simply, "livewriters feed" and I will be known by my posts now, promise, or at least I will know myself by those posts then..."

alj wrote:

Mark David Gerson recently asked to be my Facebook friend. We have a few friends in common, and I am a fan of his work, but I suspect that maybe he read Forever Travels.

Mark is a friend of mine on facebook, too, Ann. If he has read Forever Travels, he has very good taste!

I disagree with just about everythings that's said here. I read - all the time. So do the other writers in the group I joined. Some of them have blogs, but they still read.

And while I've tried to make up with a certain someone, the prejudice is still obvious. And others agree. I'm shocked. Why would someone say commerical fiction is boring on a writers forum? And have other agree? Their must be some commerical fiction writers here. Why don't they speak up?

And to that person, I would've hated being in your class if you talked in class about writing the same as you do here. You would've squashed any ambitions I would've had.

What do you consider literary fiction? And do YOU write literary fiction? If so, where? I haven't seen it. I think anyone who writes in whatever they want is wonderful. If they finish the darn thing they've accomplished something wonderful, many try and never finish. And every kind of book has someone interested. My brother loves fantasy and buys and reads books in that field all the time. I'm happy that he reads, I'd never tell him or even hint that what he reads is trash and if you had been his teacher and would've said anything like that, youd have his entire family to answer to.

This place is something else.

I read a lot and buy a lot of books. I've from numerous authors over the years that to write well you need to read a lot.

When I heqar a writer tell me how little they read, I cringe.

Did someone say commercial fiction is boring? I missed that. Much of it is formulaic, but so what? If it's selling, obviously someone is reading. I think the overall point is that if you want to write publishable stuff, you have to read what is being published. Including what formulae are successful.

On a tangent, I used to love, love, love the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books when I was a kid, and they were as formulaic as it gets.

Hi Lynn,

This is the post I made on Literature & Fiction:

Quote :

I’ve been reading a lot recently, which got me thinking. So, what was I thinking? I was thinking about all these books that most people believe they have in them.

I received a phone call recently from a call centre trying to sell accident insurance. The young woman asked me what I did. I said I was a writer. “Oh,” she replied, “is that right? What have you written? A book?” I said that I had written a couple of books. “I must have a go at that someday,” she said. “They say that we all have a book in us, don’t they?” I said that they did indeed say that we all have a book in us.

I don’t think they say it quite so often these days. Probably because they want the book that is inside them to actually become a book. Instead of saying that we have all got a book inside us, they write it out and then start looking around for a publisher. Not satisfied with a stack of rejections, they find ways through the Internet of seeing their work printed and bound and, voilá, they have a book.

This is the new millennium with new technology that is readily available to everyone. Reading books is going out of fashion while writing books has become the thing to do.

PublishAmerica may have been one of the first to print anything that was correctly formatted and could be converted easily into a PDF file. They are not the last. “Traditional” publishers are springing up all over the ‘net. There is a market out there to be tapped and companies are taking advantage of the growing market.

Where does this leave mid-list authors? It leaves them fighting to find readers because their readers have become writers. Where’s the fun in reading someone else’s thoughts when you can write down and publish your own?

You can read the comments here:

http://shelaghwatkins.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/is-writing-replacing-reading/

Sometimes we just get misunderstood.

See what I mean, Alice?

Ann

alj wrote:

Sometimes we just get misunderstood.

See what I mean, Alice?

Ann

Yes!

alj wrote:

Sometimes we just get misunderstood.

See what I mean, Alice?

Ann

Misunderstood? Bull. I liked you fine when i joined, but youre many posts about your opinion about literary fiction and commercial fiction made me feel different. Paint by numbers, you said in one. There are others to.

Misunderstood? youre supposed to be a writer and we know writers by what they write. I can read, maybe I don't write so well yet, but I can learn. I know you by what you write and what youve said, hinted at many times. As someone who wants to learn, I'm insulted by your opinions.

And, you didn't answer. What do you consider literary fiction, and if it's the only thing worth writing, why aren't YOU writing it?

I don't play games, lyntx, and I've learned (I think) to not get baited into useless arguments.

You have a good day, OK?

Ann

alj wrote:

I don't play games, lyntx, and I've learned (I think) to not get baited into useless arguments.

You have a good day, OK?

Ann

So your talking your ball and going home? Why don't you fucking answer the man's question?

He asked "why aren't you writing literary fiction?"

Well, answer instead of being a baby when you are loosing yet another fucking argument and walking away?