Doodles by Dain Lee. Get info
on submitting your own artwork here.

Subscribe

RSS Feed
Weekly Newsletter
Updates, top stories & our favorite links straight to your inbox.


Email Marketing Powered by MailChimp

Contributors

JK Evanczuk | Email

Jennifer Blevins | Email
The Blevins Blog

Andrew Boryga | Email
Skilled Loser

Zach Bushnell | Email

Jessica Digiacinto
Twitter

Alex Lam | Email
Anthology Media

Tracy Marchini
Twitter
My VerboCity

Tanya Paperny | Email
Culturally Progressive

Toby Shuster
Twitter
AlongThoseLines

Morgan von Ancken | Email

Everything I Know About Writing I Learned From The 650-Pound Virgin

By Jessica Digiacinto on Friday, December 11, 2009 - 2 COMMENTS

In the writing world, creativity is often confused with complexity. Flowery prose that marches on for years, knotty metaphors so strange there’s a reason they’ve never been used before, and dense paragraphs that require a tweezers to get through – that, to certain writers, is success.

I once had a professor who thought reading should be a mental cardio session, a humbling experience that wasn’t complete until you threw the book against a wall in frustration. I never did well in that class; partly because I couldn’t stop myself from thinking he was an egotistic asshole and therefore skipping his assignments, but also because I subscribe to the TLC theory of creativity.

The more to the point you are, the more likely people are to listen.

TLC is a television station that’s not afraid to lay it all out on the table. They’re also not afraid to dedicate about 60% of their airtime to little people, obese virgins, and the occasional show that makes you wish you weren’t eating a burrito while watching. Read more »

15 minutes
  • Check out @ElectricLit's new video--beautiful. http://ow.ly/2wRkf 1 week ago
  • New FREE BOOK FRIDAY: Attempts at a Life by Danielle Dutton, courtesy of @TarpaulinSky. Quirky & moving stories. Pls RT! http://ow.ly/2vOap 1 week ago
  • New FREE BOOK FRIDAY: "The Puppet" by Reif Larsen, brought to you by the good folks at @onestorymag. Good luck & pls RT! http://ow.ly/2suaB 2 weeks ago
  • How writing is like boxing. http://ow.ly/2rgQR 3 weeks ago
  • This Week: deliciously awful literary mashups, introducing the Facebook novel, Quasimodo was real (kind of) & more. http://ow.ly/2rgO5 3 weeks ago