Quote of the day
“I am helping to train a guide dog that will assist an individual who is blind. At my stage of training, the dog is learning to be comfortable in busy social situations and to obey all the basic commands she will be given when working as a guide dog. When I finish this part of her program, she will go to a more skilled trainer who will teach her Intelligent Disobedience.”
What do you mean by intelligent disobedience?
“Most of the time it’s really important that the dog obeys the human’s instructions. But sometimes it would be dangerous to do so; for example, when a man with limited sight gave the command to step off a curb just as quiet hybrid car was turning into the street. The dog must know not to obey a command that will put the team–human and dog–in danger. Learning not to obey is a higher order of skill. It will require a trainer who is more experienced than I am.”
~IRA CHALEFF, author of Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You’re Told to Do Is Wrong
WRITING
- How to describe a place, Go Teen Writers | Tweet
Wouldn’t it be better to leave all this up to the reader’s imagination? Why Bother Describing Things?
Description (Elements of Fiction Writing)
- Why your characters are boring?, The Authors’ Nook | Tweet
Have you ever had that problem, a character you know so well refuses to show who they really are on paper?
How To Create A Character (For Your Novel): The Best Book On Characterization You’ve Ever Read
Imagery conveys more than describing a setting. Done right, it can enhance the emotion and pull the reader into your writing in a unique way to them. It’s not merely about “show don’t tell.” Imagery is a skill that embellishes your author voice.
Writing and Imagery: How to Avoid Writer’s Block (How to Become an Author)
We all know that stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, but as writers, it can be surprisingly easy to skimp on one or all of these sections.
Elements of Fiction Writing – Beginnings, Middles & Ends
SCREENWRITING
- SCRIPT NOTES: Major Character Types – “Reflection”, Script Mag | Tweet
A protagonist’s reflection character is far too frequently the most underutilized of the five character purposes, especially by less experienced scribes.
- Writing and the Creative life: Believing is seeing, Go Into The Story | Tweet
We can invert the old saying “seeing is believing” to “believing is seeing.” That is, if we believe our characters exist in their own unique story universe, then we can eventually see them.
Standout Characters: How to Forge an Emotional Bond with Readers
SELF-PUBLISHING
- What is YouTube and why is so important?, Writers write | Tweet
YouTube is Google’s video-sharing site, which has more than one billion unique visitors each month. This is a platform where users can view, share, and upload videos.
YouTube Black Book: How To Create a Channel, Build an Audience and Make Money on YouTube
- Using beta readers to help you write your best novel, Live Write Thrive | Tweet
Writing is an act of communication, so it is only natural that you would want to show your work to other people. So then the questions arise: When should I show my work to beta readers? What should I show them? And how can I manage the process so that I get the most out of it?
SELF-IMPROVEMENT
You ramble, or use unstudied speech when you don’t plan and organize your talk. When you organize your thoughts and points prior to delivering a talk, you will speak better.
Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds
CREATIVITY
- What you call your ideas affects what you can do with them, Creative Something | Tweet
If you call an idea a “hunch,” or a “theory,” you give yourself permission to explore it more freely.
Breakthrough Thinking: A Guide to Creative Thinking and Idea Generation
PSYCHOLOGY
- Exploring the good kind of disobedience, Psychology Today | Tweet
Chaleff is practical in his approach as well as historically illustrative and analytical. He provides steps and rules, like the following small sample, to give the potential disobeyer a sense of how to walk through an intelligent disobedience check list, like a pilot ready to fly a plane.
Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You’re Told to Do Is Wrong
ECONOMICS
Risk-taking behavior is highly correlated between parents and their children; however, little is known about the extent to which these relationships are genetic or determined by environmental factors.
The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust
TECHNOLOGY
- Finding iPad’s future, Above Avalon | Tweet
We have gotten to the point that the status quo will likely lead to the iPad and the modern-day tablet becoming irrelevant over time. A new direction for iPad is needed based on a fundamental rethink of tablet computing.