Reference Materials

Not that I'm suggesting that we all start writing screenplays but Write Screenplays That Sell the Ackerman Way by Hal Ackerman is a good read. It talks a lot about story and how to tell one. In a movie context of course but keeping you audience sitting down and watching (or reading) has a lot in common between the screen and a book.

He also describes a method using 3x5 cards to build a story. It may result in a bit of a short novel but that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

I've never actually written a script but I have been tempted and here are some links that I accumulated. The celtx link is to some free script writing software that I've heard good things about.

http://www.scifiscripts.com/default.html
http://www.thescriptorium.net/index.html
http://www.script-o-rama.com/oldindex.shtml
http://www.hcdonline.com/
http://www.hollywoodlitsales.com/
http://www.scriptassist.com/
http://www.celtx.com/
http://www.scriptfrenzy.org/
http://www.wordplayer.com/
http://www.scriptforsale.com/

Dave K

Here is an interesting web site

http://www.peacecorpswriters.org/pages/depts/resources/resour_writers/1…

It is a 100 days of encouragement and advice about writing a novel. On the first day you make a promise to yourself that you are going to do it.

On the lighter side go see http://spaceark.net/ . One of his "reviews" seems to be part of a rejection letter from the Austin Wahl Agency. This agency is one that is "Not Recommended" by Preditors and Editors because it charges a reading fee.

If you write for a younger audience, at any level, than JOIN THIS GROUP. It was the best writing decision I've made so far.

scbwi.org

Yes, the acronym is as clunky as they come, but I've heard the story behind its existence (it's not that funny, but I know it!)

The group includes writers and illustrators of Picture Books, Early Chapter Books, Middle-Grade Novels, Young Adult Novels, Hardcore Teen Novels, Nonfiction magazine articles and books, graphic novels, and way more.

Everyone is welcome and is welcoming, at all ability levels, from rookies to pros. That is not the case with many other writing organizations. Instant market updates. Easy to find In-person and online critique groups. My local MI chapter is super active. The conferences I've attended have been first class with easy access to writers and editors. You get a huge foot in the door by being an SCBWI member. It really is worth it.

I got the book The Creative Writer's Style Guide by Christopher T. Leland the other day. It is a style guide much like The Chicago Manual of Style or The Gregg Reference Manual but this one is focused on creative writing not business styles. The best part was that B&N had it in the bargain books for only $6. It is definitely worth that, and if you don't have another good reference this is a good one to start with, even at full price.

It starts with a section on parts of speech, for those of us who slept through high school english, goes on to sentence structure, punctuation, and a whole chapter on dialogue. The second section is about style.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/science/13brain.html

A paralyzed man with a small sensor implanted in his brain was able to control a computer, a television set and a robot using only his thoughts, scientists reported yesterday.
Rick Friedman
Matthew Nagle, left paralyzed when he was stabbed five years ago, and the circle he drew on a computer screen by using only his thoughts.
Those results offer hope that in the future, people with spinal cord injuries, Lou Gehrig’s disease or other conditions that impair movement may be able to communicate or better control their world.
“If your brain can do it, we can tap into it,” said John P. Donoghue, a professor of neuroscience at who has led development of the system and was the senior author of a report on it being published in today’s issue of the journal Nature.
In a variety of experiments, the first person to receive the implant, Matthew Nagle, moved a cursor, opened e-mail, played a simple video game called Pong and drew a crude circle on the screen. He could change the channel or volume on a television set, move a robot arm somewhat, and open and close a prosthetic hand.
Although his cursor control was sometimes wobbly, the basic movements were not hard to learn.
“I pretty much had that mastered in four days,” Mr. Nagle, 26, said in a telephone interview from the New England Sinai Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Stoughton, Mass. He said the implant did not cause any pain.
Mr. Nagle, a former high school football star in Weymouth, Mass., was paralyzed below the shoulders after being stabbed in the neck during a melee at a beach in July 2001. He said he had not been involved in starting the brawl and did not even know what had sparked it. The man who stabbed him is now serving 10 years in prison, he said.
Implants like the one he received had previously worked in monkeys. There have also been some tests of a simpler sensor implant in people, as well as systems using electrodes outside the scalp. And Mr. Nagle has talked before about his experience.
But the paper in Nature is the first peer-reviewed publication of an experiment in people with a more sophisticated implant, able to monitor many more brain neurons than earlier devices. The paper helps “shift the notion of such ‘implantable neuromotor prosthetics’ from science fiction towards reality,” Stephen H. Scott, professor of anatomy and cell biology at Queen’s University in Ontario, wrote in a commentary in the journal.
The sensor measures 4 millimeters by 4 millimeters — less than a fifth of an inch long and wide — and contains 100 tiny electrodes. The device was implanted in the area of Mr. Nagle’s motor cortex responsible for arm movement and was connected to a pedestal that protruded from the top of his skull.
When the device was to be used, technicians plugged a cable connected to a computer into the pedestal. So Mr. Nagle was directly wired to a computer, somewhat like a character in the “Matrix” movies.
Mr. Nagle would then imagine moving his arm to hit various targets. The implanted sensor eavesdropped on the electrical signals emitted by neurons in his motor cortex as they controlled the imaginary arm movement.
Obstacles must be overcome, though, before brain implants become practical. For one thing, the electrodes’ ability to detect brain signals begins to deteriorate after several months, for reasons not fully understood. In addition, the implant would ideally transmit signals wirelessly out of the brain, doing away with the permanent hole in the head and the accompanying risk of infection. Further, the testing involving Mr. Nagle required recalibration of the system each day, a task that took technicians about half an hour.
Still, scientists said the study was particularly important because it showed that the neurons in Mr. Nagle’s motor cortex were still active years after they had last had a role to play in moving his arms.
The implant system, known as the BrainGate, is being developed by Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems Inc. of Foxborough, Mass. The company is now testing the system in three other people, who remain anonymous: one with a spinal cord injury, one with Lou Gehrig’s disease and one who had a brain stem stroke.
Timothy R. Surgenor, president and chief executive, said Cyberkinetics hoped to have an implant approved for marketing as early as 2008 or 2009. Dr. Donoghue, the chief developer, is co-founder and chief scientist of Cyberkinetics. Some of the paper’s other authors work at the company, while still others are from academic or medical institutions including Like his performance in other tasks, Mr. Nagle’s control of the computer cursor was not particularly smooth. When his goal was to guide the cursor from the center of the screen to a target on the perimeter, he hit the target 73 to 95 percent of the time. When he did, it took 2.5 seconds on average, but sometimes much longer. And the second patient tested with the implant had worse control than he, the paper said.
By contrast, healthy people moving the cursor by hand hit the target almost every time, and in only one second.
Dr. Jonathan R. Wolpaw, a researcher at the New York State Department of Health, said the BrainGate performance did not appear to be substantially better than that of a noninvasive system he is developing using electroencephalography, in which electrodes are placed outside the scalp.
“If you are going to have something implanted into your brain,” Dr. Wolpaw said, “you’d probably want it to be a lot better.”
Dr. Donoghue and other proponents of the implants say they have the potential to be a lot better, because they are much closer to the relevant neurons than are the scalp electrodes, which get signals from millions of neurons all over the brain.
One way to improve implant performance was suggested by another paper in the same issue of Nature. In a study involving monkeys, Krishna V. Shenoy and colleagues at Stanford University eavesdropped not on the neurons controlling arm movement but on those expressing the intention to move, which occurs earlier and would make the system work faster.
“Instead of sliding the cursor out to the target, we can just predict which target would be hit and the cursor simply leaps there,” said Dr. Shenoy, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and neurosciences. He said the system could operate at the equivalent of typing 15 words a minute, about four times as fast as the devices produced by Cyberkinetics and Dr. Wolpaw.
After more than a year, Mr. Nagle had his implant removed so he could undergo another operation, which allowed him to breathe without a ventilator. He can control a computer by voice, so he does not really need the implant. But he said he was happy he had volunteered for the experiment.
“It gave a lot of people hope,” he said.

Here's a link to a monthly newsletter with writing advice that members and guests may find useful at http://userpages.burgoyne.com/workshop/download.pdf

Stuck for names? Looking for something more memorable than "Robert Smith"? Try these:

For you SF or modern story tellers, here is a random name generator for "normal" names, drawn from US census data. I really like this one. You can specify the "unusualness" of the names:

http://www.kleimo.com/random/name.cfm

This one is terrific. It creates "normal" and fantasy names, names for towns and places, cultural names, and more:

http://www.squid.org/tools/names/

Fantasy name generator, with a number of different rulesets for different name types:

http://spitfire.ausys.se/johan/names/

Windoze users can even download the app itself to have on your PC. Go to http://spitfire.ausys.se/johan/workshop/ and download the 32 bit executable Win version. It's an old Win95 app but it runs in XP. You also need the rule files (look on that page for the link to them and unzip in the same directory as the program). The rules files are in Swedish but it's pretty easy to follow the format if you want to make your own for a particular naming scheme (I did this, very nice).

Here is another fantasy one with a number of unusual rulesets. There is a help section that tells you how to write your own rulesets. That looks really good but since it's all online you would have to save rulesets on your own PC and paste them in.

http://rinkworks.com/namegen/

Here are different ways for a character to look (at something), culled from various places:

look:

admire, analyze, appraise, assay, beam, behold, beware, bore, canvas, check over, confront, consider, contemplate, descry, diagnose, discern, distinguish, espy, examine, eye, eyeball, face, follow, gape, gawk, gawk, gawp, gaze, glance, glare, glimpse, gloat, glower, goggle, heed, inspect, investigate, judge, leer, loom, make out, mark, mind, note, notice, observe, ogle, once-over, peek, peep, peer, penetrate, perceive, peruse, pierce, poke, poll, ponder, probe, prospect, pry, quiz, rake, regard, remark, review, rubber-neck, run down, scan, scout, screen, scrutinize, scry, search, see, sense, sift, size up, skim, spectate, spot, spy, squint, stare, study, survey, suss out, take stock, tend, trace, twig, verify, view, watch, weigh, witness

Any others?

Here are different ways for a character to run, culled from various places:

run:

barrel, bolt, break away, breeze, bullet, bustle, chase, clip, dart, dash, dig, double-time, drive, escape, flee, flit, fly, hasten, hotfoot, hurry, hustle, jog, lope, peg, pelt, plunge, race, ram, roll, rush, scamper, scarper, scoot, scurry, scuttle, shin, skedaddle, skelp, skip, skirr, skitter, speed, sprint, spurt, streak, surge, thrust, trot, vanish, whiz, zip

Any others?