oliver yeh

The 10 best first lines in fiction

Something to stir the Sunday pot. Have a better one?

Charlie Kaufman Sets Debut Novel At Grand Central Publishing

“The subject of the novel is being kept under wraps, which is probably just as well since it is pretty close to impossible to log line any of his original script creations anyway, even if you try after seeing his wonderfully imaginative movies.”

On Norman Mailer and the origins of Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan

ecantwell:

austinkleon:

Jonah Lehrer on NPR:

This is a great story from Dan Wieden at Wieden Kennedy, the very honored Portland ad firm. … He’d come up with seven videos for the new Nike ad campaign. … He knew these different videos which featured different sports needed a shared slogan. But he just couldn’t think of the slogan. … At some point during the day, somebody must’ve mentioned Norman Mailer to him. And so Norman Mailer was in the back of his head somewhere.

“It’s near midnight. His deadline’s approaching. He’s really, really frustrated at this point because he can’t come up with this damn slogan. And then suddenly he thinks of Norman Mailer. He remembers Norman Mailer wrote this book called The Executioner’s Song about Gary Gilmore. And he remembers Gary Gilmore’s last words right before he’s executed by a firing squad in Utah. His last words were, ‘Let’s do it.’

“And Dan Wieden thinks to himself, Geez, that’s pretty brave. That’s a pretty brave sentiment to have right before you die — to just get it over with. But he realizes ‘Let’s Do It’ isn’t quite right, so he tweaks one word. And there you get ‘Just Do It.’ … But that’s a perfect example of how, in a sense, that’s an old idea. It was a line in a Norman Mailer book, and he tweaked it ever so slightly. He substituted one word and came up with one of the most influential advertising slogans of the second half of the 20th century.”

Lehrer’s new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works is out now.

There could not be a better backstory for the Nike slogan. 

Your Brain on Fiction

“The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.”

Kyung-sook Shin Is First Woman to Win Man Asian Literary Prize

A Literary History of Word Processing