The Idea Farm's Blog

  The Jane Austen Writers' Club: Inspiration and advice from the world's best-loved novelist, by Rebecca Smith (New York Bloomsbury, 2016). While creative writing manuals use examples from twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers, The Jane Austen Writers' Club is the first to look at the methods and devices used by the world's most beloved novelist. Austen was a creator of immortal characters and a pioneer in her use of language and point of view; her advice continues to be relevant two centuries after her death. Rebecca Smith examines the major aspects of writing fiction such as plotting, characterization, openings and endings, dialogue, settings, and writing methods. Smith shares the advice Austen gave in letters to her aspiring novelist nieces and nephew and providing many and varied exercises for writers to try, using examples from Austen's work.

The United Nations is holding a memorial ceremony at the General Assembly in Manhattan, New York on January 27, 2023, and other memorial events are scheduled around the globe. “The story of the struggle to save tens of thousands needs to be a part of the chronicles of the people of Israel,” said David Gur, 97, one of few survivors still alive. “It is a lighthouse during the period of the Holocaust, a lesson and exemplar for the generations.” Gur is the author of the memoir, “Brothers for Resistance and Rescue” where he recounts how the Jewish underground broke him out of the central military prison in a rescue operation. Brothers for Resistance and Rescue -  Gefen Publishing  House Hungary was home to around 900,000 Jews before the Nazi invasion. Its government was allied with Nazi Germany, but as the Soviet Red Army advanced toward Hungary, the Nazis invaded in March 1944, to prevent its Axis ally from making a separate peace deal with the Allies. Over the next 10 months, as ...

Instagram is Helping You Focus With Quiet Mode Instagram is launching ‘Quiet mode’ to help people focus, and to encourage people to set boundaries with friends and followers. Once enabled, you won’t receive any notifications, your profile’s activity status will change to ‘In quiet mode’ and we’ll automatically send an autoreply when someone DMs you. Instagram users have told them that they sometimes want to take time for themselves and are seeking ways to focus at night, while studying, and during work or school.  With quiet mode one can simply customize hours to fit your schedule and once the feature is turned off, we’ll show you a quick summary of notifications so you can catch up on what you missed. ‘Quiet mode’ is available to everyone in the US, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and Instagram hopes to expand to more countries soon. Instagram Supports Teens’ safety with Updated Parental Supervision Tools Instagram aims to help parents be more aware o...