Toolbox for Writing: Novels, Short Stories, Essays

This framed novel is narrated in the first person (by both narrators), and because both narrators have a sound education their prose is elevated and literary. Even the dialogues contain lyrical tones. Although the genre wasn’t quite yet developed, the techniques used by the author are well advanced of his times. Manon Lescaut (1893), inspired Italian composer Giacomo Puccini to compose the opera by the same name.
http://www.professorguerrero.com/2013/07/abbe-prevosts-novel-manon-lescaut.html

Professor Guerrero's Blog: Abbe Prevost's Novel Manon Lescaut Write Like a Pro is a blog that contains book reviews of the classics, accounting lessons, articles of human interest, and writing techniques.

"To sleep, to dream, to wish, to be or not to be--life make me curious about the other shore."
Note the effective use of opening your sentence with infinitives.

4. Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot and Traffic to my Website
When I first set up my blog and populated it with —what I thought at the time were— interesting postings, I hoped and waited for readers to come visit, spend a good deal of time on my site, and enjoy my writing.
Hopeful as an evergreen song, I installed a meter, not to count the hits but to see where they came from. The wait started. Soon I learned that hoping and waiting will get you nowhere. My site was inviting, attractive, and yet no one came along the road to acknowledge me; and the constant wait continued for a long time.
Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot reminds me of the hopelessness that I experienced in waiting for readers to visit my site.
The play leads nowhere, solves nothing, adds to nothing. Strange it is, to say the least! Vladimir and Estragon, the two main characters, embody boredom and futility. Their actions as well as their discussions are totally useless; they lack focus, and are often silly.
When I visit some websites I can’t help feeling that same negative energy that Beckett wanted to convey. But there are lessons to be learned—just wait.
While Vladimir and Estragon kill the time asking each other questions for which there are no answers, bloggers and marketers waste their lives by exchanging links and visiting and reading each other’s sites. And much like the evanescent memories of the characters of the play, bloggers and web-people won’t remember that they did exchange links; even worse, no one remembers them or their websites.
Indeed, waiting for traffic to your site is like waiting for Godot—theater of the absurd.
Besides Vladimir and Estragon, two other characters add to the insane scenes: Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo is a dominant character and he sports a lasso and a whip with which he leads the weak Lucky, like a dog.
In the second act, Vladimir and Estragon continue their babblings and seemed to have forgotten everything they had discussed the previous day. This includes forgetting Pozzo and Luky! Since they have no links of memories to trade (like modern bloggers and marketers), they start trading their hats. Later both Pozzo and Lucky return to scene, one blind and the other mute.
When both Pozzo and Lucky exit from the scene after performing much antics and discoursing on religious as well as political issues with Vladimir and Estragon, another boy enters the scene saying that he has been sent by Godot. The boy tells them both that Mr. Godot will not be able to come today and will come tomorrow. Both Vladimir and Estragon send the boy back telling him: All this absurdity and loss of memory confirms the fact that there is no truth in the world.
Basically the theme running throughout the play is futility and purposelessness of existence and life. It is human beings who try to infuse purpose in the otherwise chaotic scheme of things. The play gives importance to the role of chance in life that acts as the driving force in life.
Nobody knows what happened the day before and night after night falls without anyone being aware as to what happened the days before.
The play repudiates the existence of an organized structure to life and reiterates the fact that time is based on chance and hence, human life is based on chance too.
Yet, I refuse to go along with Beckett’s view of life. Waiting for something is deeply ingrained in our psyche, our minds, and our collective consciousness—our culture. Waiting is a slice of time. We live in order to wait for things to happen. The merit of a well-lived life is in not waiting but in acting, in doing, in achieving a myriad of goals. Only by destroying the ‘time paradigm’ will we destroy the view of the futility and purposelessness of life.
When the prophet Mohammed told the multitude that he would have the mountain come to him, and the mountain didn’t budge—he went to the mountain!
Given the choice between Beckett and Mohammed, I choose Mohammed.
Today, rather than wait for readers to come to my blog, I go to them.

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When Mitt Romney Came to Town

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Strawberry Fields Forever 28th November 1966. The Beatles were recording Strawberry Fields Forever at Abbey Road studios. It was the second session recording the track, which was rele...