LANGUAGE AND WRITING: JOURNALISM, FICTION AND NON-FICTION, POETRY
SCRIPTS AND FORMATS - Writing for TV
John de Mol wants you. Or rather, he wants your ideas for new television formats. The Dutch entrepreneur who created Big Brother will choose the best ones to develop, produce and distribute. If you need good material to create your stories, go to TV Tropes, an entire wiki devoted to writing stories, from character and plot construction (there’s a vast and interesting repertoire here) to analysis of the various media and genres, porn included.
Sign up, choose the homepage of your favourite newspaper (from the New York Times to the Osservatore Romano) and fill it, free of charge. You can also create new fake templates and share them online. General.
A great collection of tips from the most important school of creative writing in the US. The graphics are sparet, but the quantity of useful indications on every aspect of writing is vast. General.
This great blog about book covers has been situated in Writing instead of Graphic design because a good cover has a strong narrative sense. And every author dreams on cover like this. General.
Poewar, a compression of ‘poet warrior’, is the blog on professional writing by the American author and editor John Hewitt. Sign up for the newsletter and you may even receive job offers. General.
Unmissable site on American journalism, also. The Career Center section features testimonials, advice and job offers. New media, photojournalism, reporting, professional ethics. General.
PUBLISH A BOOK - How to do it online
Want to publish and sell a book you’ve written? Today you can do it through several self-publishing websites. In 2006 alone, its first year in Italy, Lulù published 7,200 works. Watch or read an interview with the founder, Bob Young, one of the figures behind the success of Linux. Gruppo L’Espresso’s ilmiolibro.it has recently developed a similar service for the Italian market. If you’re a small publisher, use The Boopen to publish in partnership, sharing publishing rights and co-promoting new authors. Another good address is Blurb. If you want to browse and bookmark the best publications on the web, check out Issu.
The perfect marriage of literature and science. 2,000 topics (from accident prevention to aerodynamics to x-ray lasers) about which artists, playwrights and writers can ask expert researchers. General.
WRITING IN RHYME - Cuore, amore, compressore...
Need a rhyme in Italian? Find it in Golnet, the Italian online dictionary of rhymes, or in the inverted dictionary. If poetry is your bread and butter, surf the Poetry Portal and learn with Poetrymagic. Discover the many fascinating aspects of contemporary poetry (images, sounds, rhythms, voices) by surfing the sections of Ubuweb. Watch how language is shaped and finds expressive power through integration with new media.
Texts, audio and a newsletter. Don’t miss the thematic archive (culture, environment, copyright, anti-fascism) and Nandropausa, a collection of stories. An extremely rich cultural manifesto. General.
People don’t read on the web, but instead scan the page. The rules of good writing, therefore, change dramatically. Jacob Nielsen teaches you everything you need to know. Technical-general.
