Writing prompts for adults to excite the imagination and help you develop skills and overcome writer’s block or explore new writing frontiers.
Thea's overprotective parents are driving her insane. They invade her privacy, ask too many questions, and restrict her online time so severely that Thea feels she has no life at all. When she discovers a new role-playing game online, Thea breaks the rules by staying up late to play. She's living a double life: on…
“The Sage is occupied with the unspokenand acts without effort.Teaching without verbosity,producing without possessing,creating without regard to
“He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.” William Shakespeare, “Love's Labour's Lost” (1598).
When communicating a message, brevity can be more viable than verbosity. It depends on the message you want to convey, your delivery method, and your intended audience. As a game developer, your...
Learn from Tim Berglund (Senior Director of Developer Advocacy, Confluent) important troubleshooting steps and techniques to debug problems with your Kafka Connect pipelines. This video includes details that will help you understand log messages, increasing log verbosity, and how to view the status of tasks.
I WAS a mere lad when I first encountered the science-fiction fantasy Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Its multi-dimensional worlds amused me; but its 19th-century verbosity challenged my typical teen Attention Deficit Disorder. (Wife Dottie offers her ADD cure: “You there, pay attention!”) And I’m sure I missed its biting satire of Victorian society…
Mikhail Bulgakov A Country Doctor's Notebook With the ink still wet on his diploma, the twenty-five-year-old Dr Mikhail Bulgakov was flung into the depths of rural Russia which, in 1916-17, was still largely unaffected by such novelties as the motor car, the telephone or electric light. How his alter-ego copes (or fails to cope) with the new and often appalling responsibilities of a lone doctor in a vast country practice - on the eve of Revolution - is described in Bulgakov's delightful blend of candid realism and imaginative exuberance. A marvelous writer. The oil lamps of his little provincial hospital seemed to him a lonely beacon which symbolised the battle between light and darkness... These straightforward yet extraordinary sketches gain their strength from also being the account of a young man's growth. One begins to see that he became a novelist not because he had material but because he was storing up passion and temperament Wryly funny and fascinating, blizzards blow, wolves run loose in the forests, the doctor duels with Death, who is never satisfied... ------------------------------------ Dino Buzzati The Tartar Steppe The Tartar Steppe (Italian: Il deserto dei Tartari, literally The Desert of the Tartars) is a novel by Italian author Dino Buzzati, published in 1940. The novel tells the story of a young officer, Giovanni Drogo, and his life spent guarding the Bastiani Fortress, an old, unmaintained border fortress. The central plot of the novel focuses on Drogo's lifelong wait for a great war in which his life and the existence of the fort can prove its usefulness. The human need for giving life meaning and the soldier's desire for glory are the overriding themes of the novel. Drogo, who is posted to the remote outpost overlooking a desolate Tartar desert, spends his entire career waiting for the barbarian horde rumored to live beyond the desert. Without noticing, Drogo finds that in his watch over the fort he has let years and decades pass, and that while his old friends in the city have had children, married and lived full lives, he has come away with nothing except a shared solidarity with his fellow soldiers in their long, patient vigil. In 1976 the novel was adapted into an eponymous film (known in English as The Desert of the Tartars) by Italian director Valerio Zurlini and starring Jacques Perrin as Drogo with Max von Sydow as Horitz and Vittorio Gassman as Filimore. The film omits certain parts of the novel, especially those relating to the lives of Drogo's friends in his home town. The novel was a major influence on South African-born writer J. M. Coetzee's 1980 masterpiece, Waiting for the Barbarians, the title of which is borrowed from Constantine P. Cavafy's poem of the same name. More. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Gabriel Garcia Marquez The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor In 1955, eight crewmen were cast overboard from the Colombian destroyer Caldas, en route to its home port of Cartagena from Mobile, Ala. The sole survivor, Luis Alejandro Velasco, told his adventures to Garcia Marquez, then working as a reporter for the Bogota daily El Spectator, where Velasco's story of a seeming eternity of thirst, hunger and hallucinations first appeared. The Nobel Laureate's lean prose perfectly captures the straightforwardness of the sailor's voice as he recounts his 10-day drift at sea in a cork raft: the fading senses of direction, motion, time; his struggle against sharks, which appeared punctually each evening at 5:00; starvation that drove him to try-in vain to eat the soles of his shoes. "My heroism consisted of not letting myself die," states Velasco. This slim volume is a superb example of journalism by a professional of the art. ------------------------------- James Joyce Stephen Hero Uniquely atmospheric. Stephen Hero "sets an objective reality in the plain light of day in simple, effective prose." ----------------------------- Herman Melville Bartleby The narrator, an elderly lawyer who has a very comfortable business helping wealthy men deal with mortgages, title deeds, and bonds, relates the story of the strangest man he has ever known. One day, when asked by the narrator to help proofread a copied document, Bartleby answers with what soon becomes his stock response: "I would prefer not to." To the dismay of the narrator and to the irritation of the other employees, Bartleby performs fewer and fewer tasks around the office. The narrator makes several attempts to reason with him and to learn something about him, but Bartleby offers nothing but his signature "I would prefer not to." One weekend the narrator stops by the office unexpectedly and discovers that Bartleby has started living there. More. ------------------------------------------------------------- Antonio Skármeta Ardiente Paciencia (The Postman) This is the story of one Mario, who becomes a postman once Isla Negra, an island off the coast of Chile, gets a literate resident, Pablo Neruda. Mario is an admirer of Neruda's works, and is determined to form a personal bond with the poet, with a view to getting a coveted autograph. When Mario falls in love with the local beauty Beatriz, however, his bond with Neruda becomes much more than that of an autograph-seeker: the poet recognises a fellow dreamer in Mario, and helps him in his quest of love. The story is presented in a ceremonial language sometimes verging on the pompous, as in "He was bathed in the light of the incommensurable moon and felt certain, as he stroked her neck, that he knew about infinity." Skármeta's choice of words only adds to the charm of the novella, though. As the author shows in his prologue to "The Postman", he does not take his own verbosity seriously, using it, rather, to add an ironic touch to an otherwise idyllic tale.
