Worderella Writes

Love is a Powerful Brain System

“Men are so adulterous!”
“What makes you think men are more adulterous?”
“Men are definitely more adulterous.”
“Well… who do you think these men are having sex with?”

I have become a new fan of TED online, which is this amazing website that gives all of us the option to watch amazing performances and speakers for free, so that good ideas can proliferate. Helen Fisher on Romantic Love really got me thinking, both as a person, and as a writer. It’s about ten minutes. Fisher discusses what she says are the three brain systems of love:

1. Sexual love
2. Romantic Love
3. Attachment

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Researching Your Setting Using Google Earth

If anything is lacking in my research, it’s details about setting. Not for lack of trying, though; it’s something I tend to obsess about, if you’ll remember, but the resources about my little village is sparse at best.

Enter Google Earth. I finally caved in and installed the free application on my computer. This, despite my misgivings that I would waste hours studying the landscape rather than studying how the structure of a material changes depending on the number of vacancies at the atomic level. (I’m so glad I graduated.) Heaven help me, I was at the computer for two hours squealing about all the little physical details that, without technology, I would have had to journey to the UK to see it myself.

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Thursday Thirteen: Tools to Research Setting

I often find interesting bits of information that don’t necessarily correspond to an entire blogpost. To compensate, sometimes I’ll have a Thursday Thirteen to collect and spread the knowledge-love around, which was the original point of Worderella Writes. But I reserve the right to have a Thursday Seven, Thursday Two, Thursday Whatever-Number-I-Manage-to-Get-To… even though they don’t sound as good. Today’s theme is tools to help you research and/or write your setting.

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Guest Post: Writing on the Go

A guest post by Blair Hurley from www.blairhurley.com listing some hints on how to make sure you’re writing on the go.

Writers use their own environment constantly to enrich their stories. We draw upon our settings and the people around us to create worlds. So when we travel, it’s crucial to take advantage of the new environment and use it to improve our fiction. But when you’re on the go in a new place, how’s a writer supposed to get down information? Read on!

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Relating to my Characters: Penmanship and Fountain Pens

I envy my own characters even though they live in my head and therefore, are technically me anyway. Why the envy? They have distinctive penmanship and can wield a fountain pen with a flourish. I silently wail against the loss of the importance of penmanship in the real world, and especially the loss of my own penmanship, due to the efficiency of computers and e-mail, and the rising cost of snail mail. Or rather, I wail against the fact that I had no real patience to excel at penmanship in the first place. I could blame this on the now-now-now of today’s culture, but I won’t. I love to get mail, so I should write more of it, which should encourage more people to send me mail in the first place.

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From the Notebook: All About Lovers

In the fall I read many wonderful texts from American Lit (circa 1820 – 1860), especially some great things by feminist writers of the time. To celebrate the coming of Valentine’s Day, here is Fanny Fern’s hilarious satire of lovers and love.

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From the Notebook: Dickens’s Dictionary of London 1888

On to the subject of this post. This past summer I found treasure: Dickens’s Dictionary of London 1888 is amazing. It’s written by Charles Dickens’s son, Charles Dickens, and covers everything from how much admission will cost (according to where you sit) in every major theatre in London, to how a person should walk down the street if you don’t want to get mugged. Here is an interesting article about fog that had me chuckling…

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From the Notebook: Victorians and the Environment

By the High Victorian era, which describes the 1870s and beyond, many activists and doctors were starting to connect the welfare and livelihood of Londoners to their environment around them. In the 1860s, the Thames in London was so fetid, so polluted, that Parliament scheduled its activities so the smell wouldn’t sit stagnant in the heat. It was too hot to sit in the rooms with the windows shut, but with the windows open, the smell was so unbearable that men compared it to actual torture. Cholera, spread by bacteria in liquids, was a great epidemic in the 19th Century because of the sanitary conditions.

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Being Worderella

Things have been crazy around Worderella’s part of the world lately. I took the GRE yesterday, my second time, just to see if I could improve my somewhat decent score. I did, so huzzah! I have been reading a lot, which explains the lack of article-posting and the proliferation of book-review-posting. I’m also working on graduate school applications, my college’s magazine, and my appeal to graduate form which gets me priority scheduling for the next year.

I have not been writing. I wrote about ten thousand words last month, and this month, maybe two. I’m not too worried about this, however, because I came to a scene where I realized my character, who is very spirited, was doing something no girl in her right mind would do in 1887 London. Back to the research books for me!

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The Heart of the Story

Though this is more about feature writing in a newsmagazine or some such publication, I thought this article was helpful for us fiction writers as well. Just um…whenever he writes “journalist,” substitute “fiction writer.” In general, it works out.

The Heart of the Story
by Jon Ronson, feature writer for The Guardian

Finding a Story to Tell
How do you begin your story? All journalists are, to a greater or lesser degree, paranoid conspiracy theorists. This is because stories do not have natural boundaries, every lead can take you to another lead, every thought to another thought, and eventually – if you allow yourself to become crazy – every story you write can incorporate the past, present, and future of all human civilisation. You don’t believe me? Okay, I’m going to pick a topic at random. The Paris fashion shows.

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