David Foster Wallace’s notebook

“The relatively short extensions on letters like ‘t’ and ‘d’ indicate a writer who is “practical” and “mechanical” and suggests “short-term goals,” whatever that means. Like Palahniuk, Wallace prints, though we would argue that his writing is much more “harmonious” and thus more likely to indicate “a person who thinks in a building block fashion… able to take many small details and combine them into a coordinated whole.” Well, after our five hundredth footnote, we know that’s accurate.”

- Analyzing Writers’ Personalities From Their Handwritten Manuscripts

thepublics:

Cinema’s Invisible Art

Film is a visual medium’. So goes the screenwriter’s favourite truism. And hence the most sublime joy of reading screenplays: the language of scene action. I’m not denying the pleasures of the cinematic experience for one moment. But the literary pleasures to be had from reading well-written scene action can be extremely powerful – and yet are largely overlooked…

The General laughs. Rianne shrieks. Harrowing. Terrible. A scene out of Hell. And then the Devil comes in and kicks the door off its hinges. Okay. Okay. Let’s stop for a moment. First off, to describe fully the mayhem which Riggs now creates would not do it justice. Here, however, are a few pointers: He is not flashy. He is not Chuck Norris. Rather, he is like a sledge-hammer hitting an egg. He does not knock people down. He does not injure them.

He simply kills them. The whole room. Everyone standing.