5 Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On

in Literature, Writing | July 16th, 2014

Despite its occasional use in spoken monologue, the Very Long Literary Sentence properly exists in the mind (hence “stream-of-consciousness”), since the most wordy of literary exhalations would exhaust the lungs’ capacity. Molly Bloom’s 36-page, two-sentence run-on soliloquy at the close of Joyce’s Ulysses takes place entirely in her thoughts. Faulkner’s longest sentence—smack in the middle of Absalom, Absalom! —unspools in Quentin Compson’s tortured, silent ruminations. According to a 1983 Guinness Book of Records, this monster once qualified as literature’s longest at 1,288 words, but that record has long been surpassed, in English at least, by Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club, which ends with a 33-page-long, 13,955 word sentence. Czech and Polish novelists have written book-length sentences since the sixties, and French writer Mathias Énard puts them all to shame with a one-sentence novel 517 pages long, though its status is “compromised by 23 chapter breaks that alleviate eye strain,” writes Ed Park in the New York Times. Like Faulkner’s glorious run-ons, Jacob Silverman describes Énard’s one-sentence Zone as transmuting “the horrific into something sublime.”

Are these literary stunts kin to Philippe Petit’s highwire challenges—undertaken for the thrill and just to show they can be done? Park sees the “The Very Long Sentence” in more philosophical terms, as “a futile hedge against separation, an unwillingness to part from loved ones, the world, life itself.” Perhaps this is why the very long sentence seems most expressive of life at its fullest and most expansive. Below, we bring you five long literary sentences culled from various sources on the subject. These are, of course, not the “5 longest,” nor the “5 best,” nor any other superlative. They are simply five fine examples of The Very Long Sentence in literature. Enjoy reading and re-reading them, and please leave your favorite Very Long Sentence in the comments.

At The New Yorker’s “Book Club,” Jon Michaud points us toward this long sentence, from Samuel Beckett’s Watt. We find the title character, “an obsessively rational servant,” attempting to “see a pattern in how his master, Mr. Knott, rearranges the furniture.”

Thus it was not rare to find, on the Sunday, the tallboy on its feet by the fire, and the dressing table on its head by the bed, and the night-stool on its face by the door, and the washand-stand on its back by the window; and, on the Monday, the tallboy on its back by the bed, and the dressing table on its face by the door, and the night-stool on its back by the window and the washand-stand on its feet by the fire; and on the Tuesday…

Here, writes Michaud, the long sentence conveys “a desperate attempt to nail down all the possibilities in a given situation, to keep the world under control by enumerating it.”

The next example, from Poynter, achieves a very different effect. Instead of listing concrete objects, the sentence below from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby opens up into a series of abstract phrases.

Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Chosen by The American Scholar editors as one of the “ten best sentences,” the passage, writes Roy Peter Clark, achieves quite a feat: “Long sentences don’t usually hold together under the weight of abstractions, but this one sets a clear path to the most important phrase, planted firmly at the end, ‘his capacity for wonder.’”

Jane Wong at Tin House’s blog “The Open Bar” quotes the hypnotic sentence below from Jamaica Kincaid’s “The Letter from Home.”

I milked the cows, I churned the butter, I stored the cheese, I baked the bread, I brewed the tea, I washed the clothes, I dressed the children; the cat meowed, the dog barked, the horse neighed, the mouse squeaked, the fly buzzed, the goldfish living in a bowl stretched its jaws; the door banged shut, the stairs creaked, the fridge hummed, the curtains billowed up, the pot boiled, the gas hissed through the stove, the tree branches heavy with snow crashed against the roof; my heart beat loudly thud! thud!, tiny beads of water grew folds, I shed my skin…

Kincaid’s sentences, Wong writes, “have the ability to simultaneously suspend and propel the reader. We trust her semi-colons and follow until we are surprised to find the period. We stand on that rock of a period—with water all around us, and ask: how did we get here?”

The blog Paperback Writer brings us the “puzzle” below from notorious long-sentence-writer Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill”:

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the water of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the Mouth —- rinse the mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us – when we think of this, as we are frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Blogger Rebecca quotes Woolf as a challenge to her readers to become better writers. “This sentence is not something to be feared,” she writes, “it is something to be embraced.”

Finally, from The Barnes & Noble Book Blog, we have the very Molly Bloom-like sentence below from John Updike’s Rabbit, Run:

But then they were married (she felt awful about being pregnant before but Harry had been talking about marriage for a while and anyway laughed when she told him in early February about missing her period and said Great she was terribly frightened and he said Great and lifted her put his arms around under her bottom and lifted her like you would a child he could be so wonderful when you didn’t expect it in a way it seemed important that you didn’t expect it there was so much nice in him she couldn’t explain to anybody she had been so frightened about being pregnant and he made her be proud) they were married after her missing her second period in March and she was still little clumsy dark-complected Janice Springer and her husband was a conceited lunk who wasn’t good for anything in the world Daddy said and the feeling of being alone would melt a little with a little drink.

Sentences like these, writes Barnes & Noble blogger Hanna McGrath, “demand something from the reader: patience.” That may be so, but they reward that patience with delight for those who love language too rich for the pinched limitations of workaday grammar and syntax.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The CIA’s Style Manual & Writer’s Guide: 185 Pages of Tips for Writing Like a Spook

in English Language, Politics, Writing | July 11th, 2014

Along with toppling democratically elected governments, funneling money illegally to dubious political groups and producing pornographic movies about heads of state, the Central Intelligence Agency has also been fiendishly good at manipulating language. After all, this is the organization that made “waterboarding” seem much more acceptable, at least to the Washington elite, by rebranding it as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Another CIA turn of phrase, “extraordinary rendition,” sounds so much better to the ear than “illegal kidnapping and torture.”

Not too long ago, the CIA’s style guide, called the Style Manual and Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications, was posted online. “Good intelligence depends in large measure on clear, concise writing,” writes Fran Moore, Director of Intelligence in the foreword. And considering the agency’s deftness with the written word, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s remarkably good. Some highlights:

The guide likes the Oxford or serial comma. “Most authorities on English usage recommend [the serial comma], and it is the rule for CIA publications.”
It favors using adjectives and adverbs sparingly. “Let nouns and verbs show their power.”
In all cases, it favors American over British spellings, even proper names. Thus, “Labor Party” not “Labour Party.” And for that matter, the guide isn’t terribly keen on using phrases like “apropos” and “faux pas.” “Foreign expressions should be avoided because they sound hackneyed.”
It wisely discourages writers, or anyone really, from ever using the word “enthused.”
And they caution against using exclamation points. “Because intelligence reports are expected to be dispassionate, this punctuation mark should rarely, if ever, be used.”

And then there are some rules that will remind you this guide is the product of a particularly shadowy arm of the U.S. Government.

The guide makes a point of defining “disinformation” as opposed to “misinformation.” “Disinformation refers to the deliberate planting of false reports. Misinformation equates in meaning but does not carry the same devious connotation.” Now you know.
Undeclared wars, like Vietnam, should be spelled with an uncapitalized “w.” Same goes for the “Korean war” and the “Falklands war.” It goes on to argue that the writer should “avoid ‘Yom Kippur war’ which is slangy.” Presumably, the CIA prefers the term “The 1973 Arab-Israeli war.”
The confusing split between China and Taiwan – each refuses to recognize the other — is represented confusingly here too. “For what was once called Nationalist China or the Republic of China, use only Taiwan, both as noun and as adjective. … Avoid Taiwanese as an adjective referring to the island’s administration or its officials (and do not use the term Taiwanese government.)”

It’s unclear whether or not the guide is being used for the CIA’s queasily flip, profoundly unfunny Twitter account.

If you’re looking for a more conventional style guide, remember that Strunk & White’s Elements of Style is also online.

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

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Flannery O’Connor’s Satirical Cartoons: 1942–1945

in Comics/Cartoons, Creativity, Literature, Writing | July 10th, 2014

Sci-fi author B.C. Kowalski recently posted a short essay on why the advice to write every day is, for lack of a suitable euphemism, “bullshit.” Not that there’s anything wrong with it, Kowalski maintains. Only that it’s not the only way. It’s said Thackeray wrote every morning at dawn. Jack Kerouac wrote (and drank) in binges. Every writer finds some method in-between. The point is to “do what works for you” and to “experiment.” Kowalski might have added a third term: diversify. It’s worked for so many famous writers after all. James Joyce had his music, Sylvia Plath her art, Hemingway his machismo. Faulkner drew cartoons, as did his fellow Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, his equal, I’d say, in the art of the American grotesque. Through both writers ran a deep vein of pessimistic humor, oblique, but detectable, even in scenes of highest pathos.

O’Connor’s visual work, writes Kelly Gerald in The Paris Review, was a “way of seeing she described as part of the ‘habit of art’”—a way to train her fiction writer’s eye. Her cartoons hew closely to her authorial voice: a lone sardonic observer, supremely confident in her assessments of human weakness. Perhaps a better comparison than Faulkner is with British poet and doodler Stevie Smith, whose bleak vision and razor-sharp wit similarly cut through mountains of… shall we say, bullshit. In both pen & ink and linoleum cuts, O’Connor set deadpan one-liners against images of pretension, conformity, and the banality of college life. In the cartoon at the top, she seems to mock the pursuit of credentials as a refuge for the socially disaffected. Above, a campaigner for a low-level office deploys bombastic pseudo-Leninist rhetoric, and in the cartoon below, a cranky character escapes a horde of identical WAVES.

O’Connor was an intensely visual writer with, Gerald writes, a “natural proclivity for capturing the humorous character of real people and concrete situations,” fully credible even at their most extreme (as in the increasingly horrific self-lacerations of Wise Blood’s Hazel Motes). She began drawing at five and produced small books and sketches as a child, eventually publishing cartoons in almost every issue of her high-school and college’s newspapers and yearbooks. Her alma mater Georgia College, then known as Georgia State College for Women, has published a book featuring her cartoons from her undergraduate years, 1942–45.

More recently, Gerald edited a collection called Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons for Fantagraphics. In his introduction, artist Barry Moser describes in detail the technique of her linoleum cuts, calling them “coarse in technical terms.” And yet, “her rudimentary handling of the medium notwithstanding, O’Connor’s prints offer glimpses into the work of the writer she would become” with their “little O’Connor petards aimed at the walls of pretentiousness, academics, student politics, and student committees.” Had O’Connor continued making cartoons into her publishing years, she might have, like B.C. Kowalski, aimed one of those petards at those who dispense dogmatic, cookie-cutter writing advice as well.

via Georgia College/The Paris Review

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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How J.K. Rowling Plotted Harry Potter with a Hand-Drawn Spreadsheet

in Books, Writing | July 1st, 2014

At the height of the Harry Potter novels’ popularity, I asked a number of people why those books in particular enjoyed such a devoted readership. Everyone gave almost the same answer: that author J.K. Rowling “tells a good story.” The response at once clarified everything and nothing; of course a “good story” can draw a large, enthusiastic (and, at that time, impatient) readership, but what does it take to actually tell a good story? People have probably made more money attempting, questionably, to pin down, define, and teach the best practices of storytelling, but at the top of this post, we have a revealing scrap of Rowling’s own process. And I do, almost literally, mean a scrap: this piece of lined paper contains part of the handwritten plot spreadsheet she used to write the fifth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

This particular page (click to view it in a larger format) covers chapters 13 through 24, during which even more happens than you may now remember. It may have amounted to more than Rowling, too, could remember, hence the spreadsheet itself. Endpaper explains some of her story notes as follows:

“Prophecy”: A subplot about the prophecy Harry finds himself concerned about all through the book
“Cho/Ginny”: The book’s romantic subplot
“D.A.”: What’s happening with the resistance army, or “Dumbledore’s Army”
“O of P”: What’s happening with the “Order of the Phoenix” group
“Snape/Harry”: What’s happening with Snape and Harry
“Hagrid and Grawp”: What’s happening with Hagrid and Grawp

“If you think about Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, that’s it,” writes /Film’s Germain Lussier. “Those columns pretty much encompass the whole story.” Rowling, of course, hardly counts as the only novelist to write with such techniques, and based on this example, hers don’t get nearly as elaborate as some. (I recall once reading that Vikram Chandra had to bust out Microsoft Project to keep track of the complications of Sacred Games, his 900-page novel about the Mumbai underworld.) But Rowling must certainly rank as the most famous novelist to, quite literally, draw up spreadsheets like this. I suppose it does leave her books even more exposed to accusations of overplotting than before, but something tells me it won’t bother her.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Sound Effects Genius Michael Winslow Performs the Sounds of 32 Typewriters (1898–1983)

in Technology, Writing | June 12th, 2014

“When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me,” once wrote essayist-humorist David Sedaris. “Together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X‑ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon. ‘It’s a typewriter,’ I say. ‘You use it to write angry letters to airport security.’ ” But Sedaris, one of the last high-profile hold-outs against electronic word processing, wrote those words almost fifteen years ago — even before airport security really cracked down in our post‑9/11 reality. Surely he has since picked up and presumably learned to use a computer. We now find ourselves in an age when typewriter usage has transcended the status of an act of nostalgia and attained the status of an act of rebellion; if you insist on using a classic old Underwood Remington, or an Invicta, or a Continental Standard, or Olympia Monika Deluxe, well, you must really have a statement to make.

Yet I daresay that for all their mechanical heft, freedom from internet-borne distraction, and thoroughly analog aesthetic appeal, typewriters bring with them a number of burdens. We have their difficulty in clearing TSA lines, yes, but also their thirst for physical ink and paper (“I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed,” said Sedaris, “at least I took a few trees down with me”), and their noise — oh my, their noise. You can hear the varying sounds of 32 models belonging to many successive typewriter generations in the video at the top of the post. They don’t come as straight recordings, but as sounds reproduced by mouth to perfection by that one-in-a-million mimic Michael Winslow, best known from the Police Academy movies as Sergeant Larvell “Motor Mouth” Jones. “The History of the Typewriter Recited by Michael Winslow” originated in the mind of Spanish artist Ignacio Uriarte, who, according to Frieze, “has employed standard office supplies such as Biros, highlighters and jotters,” not to mention “the ubiquitous spreadsheet tool Microsoft Excel, perhaps soon facing its own obsolescence.” This production “tellingly culminates with the sounds of a machine from 1983, the year before the arrival of the first home computer with a graphical interface.” Which leads one to wonder: can Winslow do hard drive noises?

We’ll definitely add “The History of the Typewriter Recited by Michael Winslow” to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Ray Bradbury on Zen and the Art of Writing (1973)

in Writing | May 27th, 2014

The prolific Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and many other works both inside and outside the realm of science fiction, apparently suffered no shortage of creativity. Prolific in his fiction writing, he also proved generous in his encouragement of younger writers: we’ve previously featured not just his twelve essential pieces of writing advice but his secret to life and love. He even wrote enough on the subject of writing to constitute an entire book, the collection Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity. In the 1973 title piece, Bradbury, hardly known as a Buddhist, explains his use of the term zen for its “shock value”: “The variety of reactions to it should guarantee me some sort of crowd, if only of curious onlookers, those who come to pity and stay to shout. The old sideshow Medicine Men who traveled about our country used calliope, drum, and Blackfoot Indian, to insure open-mouthed attention. I hope I will be forgiven for using ZEN in much the same way, at least here at the start. For, in the end, you may discover I’m not joking after all.”

He breaks down his own idea of zen in his writing process by first asking himself, “Now while I have you here before my platform, what words shall I whip forth painted in red letters ten feet tall?” He paints the following, and after each we include selections from the essay:

WORK. “It is, above all, the word about which your career will revolve for a lifetime. Beginning now you should become not its slave, which is too mean a term, but its partner. Once you are really a co-sharer of existence with your work, that word will lose its repellent aspects. [ … ] We often indulge in made work, in false business, to keep from being bored. Or worse still we conceive the idea of working for money. The money becomes the object, the target, the end-all and be-all. Thus work, being important only as a means to that end, degenerates into boredom. Can we wonder then that we hate it so?”
RELAXATION. “Impossible! you say. How can you work and relax? How can you create and not be a nervous wreck? [ … ] Tenseness results from not knowing or giving up trying to know. Work, giving us experience, results in new confidence and eventually in relaxation. The type of dynamic relaxation again, as in sculpting, where the sculptor does not consciously have to tell his fingers what to do. The surgeon does not tell his scalpel what to do. Nor does the athlete advise his body. Suddenly, a natural rhythm is achieved. The body thinks for itself.”
DON’T THINK! “The writer who wants to tap the larger truth in himself must reject the temptations of Joyce or Camus or Tennessee Williams, as exhibited in the literary reviews. He must forget the money waiting for him in mass-circulation. He must ask himself, ‘What do I really think of the world, what do I love, fear, hate?’ and begin to pour this on paper. Then, through the emotions, working steadily, over a long period of time, his writing will clarify; he will relax because he thinks right and he will think even righter because he relaxes. The two will become interchangeable. At last he will begin to see himself.”
FURTHER RELAXATION. “We should not look down on work nor look down on the forty-five out of fifty-two stories written in our first year as failures. To fail is to give up. But you are in the midst of a moving process. Nothing fails then. All goes on. Work is done. If good, you learn from it. If bad, you learn even more. Work done and behind you is a lesson to be studied. There is no failure unless one stops. Not to work is to cease, tighten up, become nervous and therefore destructive of the creative process. [ … ] Isn’t it obvious by now that the more we talk of work, the closer we come to Relaxation.”
“Have I sounded like a cultist of some sort? A yogi feeding on kumquats, grapenuts and almonds here beneath the banyan tree? Let me assure you I speak of all these things only because they have worked for me for fifty years. And I think they might work for you. The true test is in the doing. Be pragmatic, then. If you’re not happy with the way your writing has gone, you might give my method a try. If you do, I think you might easily find a new definition for Work. And the word is LOVE.”

You can read much more about Bradbury’s method of working, relaxing, not thinking, and relaxing further still — and his thoughts on the joy of writing, keeping the muse fed, establishing a thousand-or-two-words-a-day habit, and “how to climb the tree of life, throw rocks at yourself, and get down without breaking your bones or your spirit” — in the book, Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Music That Helps You Write: A Free Spotify Playlist of Your Selections

in Music, Writing | May 26th, 2014

What music puts you in the mood to write? At the moment, I have on Alice Coltrane’s “Battle at Armageddon” from her 1971 Universal Consciousness, a work of psychedelic free jazz that makes my fingers skitter over the keyboard and sends thoughts racing through my mind. Should Coltrane’s mystic jazz counter the mood I want to summon, I might find something less syncopated, more lugubrious, ominous, melancholy, serene, etc. (Perhaps Grouper’s atmospheric suite of reverb-drenched tone-poems The Man Who Died in His Boat.)

This interaction between the ears, the fingers, and the writing mind struck our interest back in 2012, and we put out a call to readers to suggest the best pieces of music to write by. Some readers found that silence made for the best—or only—accompaniment. Many more made recommendations ranging from Miles Davis, to minimalist composer Steve Reich, sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, the classic Krautrock sound of Neu!, the dub reggae of King Tubby, the violin Sonatas of Bach, and the ambient soundscapes of Brian Eno. We took it upon ourselves to compile a sampling of your suggestions with Youtube videos at the time. Now we offer above a more portable Spotify version of our “music to write by” playlist—over 13 hours of music. (Stream it above. Or find it online here. If you need to download Spotify, grab the software here.) I’ve added Alice Coltrane, Grouper, and the beautiful …Until We Felt Red (2006) from one of my favorite guitarists, Kaki King.

I hope this playlist inspires you, or at least inspires you to make your own. While it could go on indefinitely, the key to a good mixtape is the art of judicious selection. Please tell us in the comments, what would you absolutely have to add? What artists, composers, and musicians get you in the mood to write, help you shift tempos, or move you from major to minor keys while you compose, whether you write nonfiction, poetry, technical manuals, or the Great American Whatever? We’ll add many of your suggestions to the playlist over the next few days.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

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How Vi Hart Makes Her Viral Videos: A Look Inside Her Creative Process

in Animation, Film, Math, Writing | May 15th, 2014

Spend some time poking around on the Khan Academy, or this site for that matter, and your chances of running into mathemusician Vi Hart are extremely favorable.

I’ve tried—and failed—to keep up with her highly digressive, rapid fire, doodle-based explanations on such topics as net neutrality and the space-time continuum. I had better luck following her directions for turning squiggles into snakes, a math-based parlor trick that seems more like magic to me.

What I really wanted to know is how does she make those funny little videos of hers? Doubtless, any seven-year-old who’s logged two or three hours in an after-school program devoted to stop motion animation would have the chops to explain how to make simple drawings rendered in Sharpie on a spiral bound notebook come to life, but what if I still didn’t get it? I wouldn’t want to give the shorties the impression that the laymen and women of my generation are too dim to keep up with modern technology.

Then on a whim, I typed “how does Vi Hart make her videos” into a search engine and voila! The video above, in which the doyenne herself reveals exactly how she does just that.

Actually “exactly” might be overstating things a bit, given that she does so in her immediately recognizable style. If I understand correctly, she starts with a script, which she pares to the essentials, before shooting the segment with a team of interns, some of whom serve as body doubles for her hands, their arms encased in funky, detachable sleeves. Then she speeds things up by deleting the frames in which the moving hand obscures the page. I’m pretty sure she wings it when recording her voiceover narration, but I could be wrong.

She also seems to have a thing for pinning her long brown hair up with a turkey feather. Even so, I’ll bet the decision to give her adoring public a glimpse of something beyond mere hands cemented many a celebrity crush. She’s a Tina Fey for the geek set. (Not that Tina Fey isn’t already serving that function for the same demographic.)

As winsome as she is, I have to say, I preferred her 14-year-old intern Ethan Bresnick’s conscientious behind-the-scenes look at how these things come together. Have a look above if you’d like some straight dope on software, camera positions, and the like.

(Depending on how much work you’ve got to get done today, you may also enjoy the extremely informal, hour-plus interview Ethan conducted via Skype, during which Hart eats her dinner and invites fans to join them via Twitter.)

The only thing lacking is the nitty gritty on how and where Hart stores her enormous video files. Without a benevolent Khan Academy to oversee my work, such technical specs would definitely come in handy for a beginner such as myself. The Sharpies on spiral bound I can figure out on my own.

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Ayun Halliday is the author of seven books, a couple of which have morphed into ebooks. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

5 Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On

The CIA’s Style Manual & Writer’s Guide: 185 Pages of Tips for Writing Like a Spook

Flannery O’Connor’s Satirical Cartoons: 1942–1945

How J.K. Rowling Plotted Harry Potter with a Hand-Drawn Spreadsheet

Sound Effects Genius Michael Winslow Performs the Sounds of 32 Typewriters (1898–1983)

Ray Bradbury on Zen and the Art of Writing (1973)

Music That Helps You Write: A Free Spotify Playlist of Your Selections

How Vi Hart Makes Her Viral Videos: A Look Inside Her Creative Process

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