How to Write a Short Story

1. Nothing can help you “learn” how to write a good,short story better than reading good short stories. Notice the style and how they have used the small amount of words to their advantage. Choose authors that you enjoy, choose some of the “classics,” as examples and if you can, find some well known authors. Pay attention to how the authors develop their characters, write dialogue, and structure their plots.
2. 

   Collect ideas for your story. Inspiration can strike at any time, so carry a notepad with you wherever you go so that you can write down story ideas as they come to you. Most of the time, you’ll just think of small snippets of information (a catastrophic event around which you can build a plot, a character’s name or appearance, etc.), but sometimes you’ll get lucky and a whole story will reveal itself to you in a couple of minutes. If you have trouble finding inspiration, or if you need to write a story in a hurry (for a class, for example), learn how to brainstormor if you can’t come up with any ideas you might have to look to family and friends for inspiration.
3. Begin with basics of a short story. After you’ve chosen an idea, you need to remember the basics of a short story before writing one. Steps to a good short story are:

   • Introduction (Introduces characters, setting, time,weather, etc.)
   • Initiating Action (The point of a story that starts the rising action)
   • Rising Action (Events leading up to the climax/turning point)
   • Climax (The most intense point of the story/the turning point of the story)
   • Falling Action (your story begins to conclude)
   • Resolution/Conclusion (a satisfying ending to the story in which the central conflict is resolved – or not -) You don’t have to write your short story in order. If you have an idea for a great conclusion, write it down. Move backward or forward from your starting idea (it may or may not be the beginning of the story), and ask “What happens next?” or “What happened before this?”
   • Find inspiration from real people. If you have trouble understanding or finding attributes of a character, turn to your life. You can easily borrow attributes of people you know or even strangers you notice. For example, you might notice someone is always drinking coffee, they talk in a loud, booming voice, they are always typing away at the computer, etc. All of these observations would together make a very interesting character, and they could easily be attributes of real people.
   • Know your characters. For a story to be believable, the characters have to be believable and realistic. It can be a difficult task to create real characters that are interesting and realistic. But here are a few strategies to create characters.
   • Write a list, titled with the character’s name, and write all the attributes you can think of, from their position in the orchestra to their favorite color. You should know as much as possible about your characters, from what their central motivations are to what their favorite foods are. You won’t include all this information in your story, but the more you know, the more your characters will come to life, both for you and for the reader.
   • Make sure your characters personalities are not perfect. In real life, nobody is perfect. Everyone has their flaws. Of course, that extends into the realm of storytelling, too. Every character needs to have some flaws, some problems, some imperfections, some insecurities. You might assume that people wouldn’t like to read about a character with a lot of flaws, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth! People can relate to characters with problems, as that’s realistic. They definitely can’t relate to perfect characters. When trying to come up with flaws, you don’t need to give your character some huge, bizarre issue (although you definitely can). For most characters, try to stick with things you know about. For example, the character could have anger issues, be afraid of water, be lonely, dislike being around other people, be sad, etc. All of these could be taken further in development.
4. Limit the breadth of your story. A novel can occur over millions of years and include a multitude of subplots, a variety of locations, and an army of supporting characters. The main events of a short story should occur in a relatively short period of time (days or even minutes), and you typically won’t be able to develop effectively more than one plot, two or three main characters, and one setting. If your story has much more breadth, it probably needs to be a novella or novel.
5. Decide who will tell the story. There are three main points of view from which to tell a story: first-person (“I”), second-person (“you”), and third-person (“he” or “she”). In a first-person story, a character in the story tells the story; in the second-person the reader is made a character in the story; and in the third-person, an outside narrator tells the story. (Second-person narration is rarely used.) Keep in mind that first-person narrators can only tell what they know (which will be limited to what they see firsthand or are told by others), while third-person narrators can either know everything and explore every character’s thoughts, or be limited to only that which can be observed.
6. Organize your thoughts. After you have prepared the basic elements of your story, it can be helpful to do out a time-line in some way to help you decide what should happen when. Your story should consist at least of an introduction, initiating incident, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. You can draw or write a visual with very simple descriptions of what should happen in each of these stages. Having this done will help you keep focused when writing the story, and you can easily make changes to it, so that you are able to keep a steady flow as you write the full story.
7. Start writing. Depending on how thoroughly you’ve sketched out your plot and characters, the actual writing process may simply be one of choosing the right words. Generally, however, writing is arduous. You probably won’t know your characters and plot as well as you thought but it doesn’t matter. Outlines are not the same as stories, and actually writing a story is the only way to complete one.
8. Come out swinging. The first page —some would say the first sentence—of any writing should grab the reader’s attention and leave him/her wanting more. A quick start is especially important in short stories because you don’t have much room to tell your story. Don’t dillydally with long introductions of the characters or uninteresting descriptions of the setting: get right into the plot, and reveal details about the characters and setting piece-by-piece as you go along.
9. 

    Keep writing.

   Keep writing. You’re almost certain to hit some bumps in the road to finishing your story. You’ve got to work through them, though. Set aside a time to write each and every day, and make it a goal to finish, say, a page each day. Even if you end up throwing away what you wrote on that day, you’ve been writing and thinking about the story, and that will keep you going in the long run.
10. Let the story “write itself”. As you write your story, you may want to turn your plot in a different direction than you had planned, or you may want to substantially change or remove a character. Listen to your characters if they tell you to do something different, and don’t worry about scrapping your plans altogether if you can make a better story as you go.
11. Revise and edit. When you’ve finished the story, go back through it and correct mechanical mistakes, as well as logical and semantic errors. In general, make sure the story flows and the characters and their problems are introduced and resolved appropriately. If you have time, put the completed story down for a few days or weeks before editing. Distancing yourself from the story in this way will help you see it more clearly when you pick it back up.
12. Get some second opinions. Send your revised and edited story off to a trusted friend or relative for revisions, edits, and suggestions. Let your reviewers know that you want to hear their real opinions of the story. Give them time to read it and think about it, and give them a copy that they can write on. Make sure you consider everything that your reviewers tell you—not just the parts you would like to hear. Thank your reviewers for reading your story, and don’t argue with them.
13. Incorporate whatever edits, revisions, and suggestions you feel are valid. Your writing will be better if you can carefully consider constructive criticism, but you don’t have to follow all the advice you get. Some of the suggestions may not be very good. It’s your story, and you need to make the final call.
14. Don’t give up. It may be frustrating if you’re having trouble writing. You can run out of steam, get angry at characters, or feel like throwing your computer or notebook across the room. Often, you can begin to doubt your own writing skills if you dislike something you’ve written. Your mind can easily tell you that it’s not worth it to continue, and you should give up. When these thoughts arise, they can easily take over and make you quit then and there. One of the hardest tasks as a writer is to learn to squash those feelings and continue writing. When you begin to have these doubtful feelings, or get tired or bored, stop writing. You can get up, take a walk, get a snack, watch TV, or anything to relax. When you return, do so with a fresh mind. You may still not want to write, but tell yourself a few good things about your story – anything about it, from one good passage you wrote, to a well-thought out dialogue, to an interesting character – congratulate yourself. If someone else knows about your story and has read it, they can also be a good source of encouragement. Just tell yourself that you will finish this story because you want to. It doesn’t matter if the story isn’t the best ever written – but you have a goal to finish it, and that’s what you’ll do.

How to Become a hacker!

So now i am going to post about how to become a hacker for a few days as i get many questions regarding this so i am fed up with those questions!! all of you just sub. to my blog and enjoy!! Happy hacking!

There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmersand networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture originated the term ‘hacker.’

There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren’t. These are people who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers object that being able to break security doesn’t make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.

There are people who apply the true hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music — but in the rest of this article we will focus the skills s of the shared culture that originated the term ‘hacker.’

THINK LIKE A HACKER

Adopt the mindset of a hacker. Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help. To be accepted as a hacker, you have to behave as though you have this kind of attitude yourself. And to behave as though you have the attitude, you have to really believe the attitude. So, if you want to be a hacker, repeat the following things until you believe them:

• The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved. Successful athletes get their motivation from a kind of physical delight in making their bodies perform, in pushing themselves past their own physical limits. Similarly, you have to get a basic thrill from solving problems, sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence.
• No problem should ever have to be solved twice. The thinking time of other hackers is precious — so much so that it’s almost a moral duty for you to share information, solve problems and then give the solutions away just so other hackers can solve new problems instead of having to perpetually re-address old ones.
• Boredom and drudgery are evil. When hackers are bored or have to drudge at stupid repetitive work, they aren’t doing what only they can do — solve new problems. To behave like a hacker, you have to want to automate away the boring bits as much as possible.
• Freedom is good. The authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and other hackers. Not all authority figures are authoritarian, however; authoritarians thrive on censorship and secrecy. And they distrust voluntary cooperation and information-sharing.
• Attitude is no substitute for competence. Hackers won’t let posers waste their time, but they worship competence — especially competence at hacking, but competence at anything is valued. Competence at demanding skills that few can master is especially good, and competence at demanding skills that involve mental acuteness, craft, and concentration is best.

Learn the Language of Programming

Learn how to program. The best way to learn is to read some stuff written by masters of the form, write some things yourself, read a lot more, write a little more, read a lot more, write some more, and repeat until your writing begins to develop the kind of strength and economy you see in your models. To be a real hacker, however, you need to get to the point where you can learn a new language in days by relating what’s in the manual to what you already know. This means you should learn several very different languages. Besides being the most important hacking languages, the following represent very different approaches to programming, and each will educate you in valuable ways.

• Python is a good language to start off with because it’s cleanly designed, well documented, and relatively kind to beginners. Despite being a good first language, it is not just a toy; it is very powerful and flexible and well suited for large projects. Javais an alternative, but its value as a first programming language has been questioned.^[1]
• If you get into serious programming, you will have to learn C, the core language of Unix (C++ is very closely related to C; if you know one, learning the other will not be difficult). C is very efficient with your machine’s resources, but will soak up huge amounts of your time on debugging and is often avoided for that reason (unless machine efficiency is essential).
• Perl is worth learning for practical reasons; it’s very widely used for active web pages and system administration, so that even if you never write Perl you should learn to read it. Many people use Perl to avoid C programming on jobs that don’t require C’s machine efficiency.
• LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot. You can get some beginning experience with LISP fairly easily by writing and modifying editing modes for the Emacs text editor, or Script-Fu plugins for the GIMP.

Familiarize Yourself With Unix

1Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it. Unix is the operating system of the Internet. While you can learn to use the Internet without knowing Unix, you can’t be an Internet hacker without understanding Unix. For this reason, the hacker culture today is pretty strongly Unix-centered. So, bring up a Unix (like Linux but there are other ways and yes, you can run both Linux and Microsoft Windows on the same machine). Learn it. Run it. Tinker with it. Talk to the Internet with it. Read the code. Modify the code.

• There are other operating systems in the world besides Unix. But they’re distributed in binary — you can’t read the code, and you can’t modify it. Trying to learn to hack on a Microsoft Windows machine or under any other closed-source system is like trying to learn to dance while wearing a body cast. Under Mac OS X it’s possible, but only part of the system is open source — you’re likely to hit a lot of walls, and you have to be careful not to develop the bad habit of depending on Apple’s proprietary code.
• Download Linux online^[2] or (better idea) find a local Linux user group to help you with installation.
• While other distros have their own areas of strength, Ubuntu is far and away the most accessible to Linux newbies.
• A good way to dip your toes in the water is to boot up what Linux fans call a live CD, a distribution that runs entirely off a CD without having to modify your hard disk. This is a way to get a look at the possibilities without having to do anything drastic.

HTML is Important

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   Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML. Most of the things the hacker culture has built do their work out of sight, helping run factories and offices and universities without any obvious impact on how non-hackers live. The Web is the one big exception, the huge shiny hacker toy that even politicians admit has changed the world. For this reason alone (and a lot of other good ones as well) you need to learn how to work the Web. This doesn’t just mean learning how to drive a browser (anyone can do that), but learning how to write HTML, the Web’s markup language. If you don’t know how to program, writing HTML will teach you some mental habits that will help you learn. So build a home page. Try to stick to XHTML, which is a cleaner language than classic HTML.

 

Learn English

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   If you don’t have functional English, learn it. English is the working language of the hacker culture and the Internet, and you will need to know it to function in the hacker community. Translations of technical books written in English are often unsatisfactory (when they get done at all). Being a native English-speaker does not guarantee that you have language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many hackers will tend to ignore you. While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, the correlation is strong. If you can’t yet write competently, learn to.

 

Earn Respect

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   Earn respect as a hacker. Like most cultures without a money economy, hackerdom runs on reputation. You’re trying to solve interesting problems, but how interesting they are, and whether your solutions are really good, is something that only your technical peers or superiors are normally equipped to judge. This is why you aren’t really a hacker until other hackers consistently call you one. Specifically, hackerdom is what anthropologists call a gift culture. You gain status and reputation in it not by dominating other people, nor by being beautiful, nor by having things other people want, but rather by giving things away: your time, your creativity, and the results of your skill.

   • Write open-source software. Write programs that other hackers think are fun or useful, and give the program sources away to the whole hacker culture to use. Hackerdom’s most revered demigods are people who have written large, capable programs that met a widespread need and given them away, so that now everyone uses them.
   • Help test and debug open-source software. Any open-source author who’s thinking will tell you that good beta-testers (who know how to describe symptoms clearly, localize problems well, can tolerate bugs in a quickie release, and are willing to apply a few simple diagnostic routines) are worth their weight in rubies. Try to find a program under development that you’re interested in and be a good beta-tester. There’s a natural progression from helping test programs to helping debug them to helping modify them. You’ll learn a lot this way, and generate good karma with people who will help you later on.
   • Publish useful information. Another good thing is to collect and filter useful and interesting information into web pages or documents like Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) lists, and make those generally available. Maintainers of major technical FAQs get almost as much respect as open-source authors.
   • Help keep the infrastructure working. The hacker culture (and the engineering development of the Internet, for that matter) is run by volunteers. There’s a lot of necessary but unglamorous work that needs done to keep it going — administering mailing lists, moderating newsgroups, maintaining large software archive sites, developing RFCs and other technical standards. People who do this sort of thing well get a lot of respect, because everybody knows these jobs are huge time sinks and not as much fun as playing with code. Doing them shows dedication.
   • Serve the hacker culture itself. This is not something you’ll be positioned to do until you’ve been around for a while and become well-known for one of the four previous items. The hacker culture doesn’t have leaders, exactly, but it does have culture heroes and tribal elders and historians and spokespeople. When you’ve been in the trenches long enough, you may grow into one of these. Beware: hackers distrust blatant ego in their tribal elders, so visibly reaching for this kind of fame is dangerous. Rather than striving for it, you have to sort of position yourself so it drops in your lap, and then be modest and gracious about your status.

5 Real Life Zombies

The thought of our bodies walking around and operating without our personal conscious or as the more spiritual believe without our soul is an idea that has intrigued and captivated the minds of human beings for centuries. Whether it be the living-dead and body snatchers of Hollywood movies or the stories of voodoo priests using potions to turn rivals into mindless drones to do their bidding, myths, movies, and stories about zombies have been a mainstay in human culture. But the idea of our bodies walking around without freewill or after we have passed may be closer to the realm of the natural than we all thought.

We have all been in the situation where we see a hideous bug in our sink or bathtub and instead of squishing it we take a more timid approach and turn the water on and drown the pest. Imagine you try to that and you watch the ugly sucker spin down the drain. You return to the bathroom later to make the horrifying discovery that the bug had returned from the dead. There are two possibilities: either you have a bathroom infested with bugs or you are dealing with a wolf spider, whose appearance is even more terrifying than its name.

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Scientists at the University of Rennes in France collected 120 Wolf Spiders and submerged them underwater and waited for them to die. After all signs of life left their little spider bodies (some stayed submerged for 40 hours) the scientists laid the corpses out to dry so they could later weigh them.

A few hours later the spiders rose from the dead. Even though they were not craving brains, the spiders still appeared to be zombies. When threatened with drowning the spiders enter a comatose state where their metabolism virtually stops and all signs of life cease (the description of this comatose state sounds like death). After things get dry they awake and carry on with their business as if nothing ever happened.

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The weta is s large insect (some species growing as large as 4 inches long) that are native to New Zealand. They have a very painful bite and can inflict painful bacteria laced scratches with their spiny legs. Their physical appearance is cricket-like but with a few distinguishing features. These creatures mere existence is terrifying but combine that with the fact that these insects are undead and you have one formidable zombie bug.

The tree weta have a protein in their blood that prevents water from freezing. Weta can survive being frozen alive for months at time in temperatures as low as -10°C by putting themselves in a suspended animation, like Sly Stallone in Demolition Man.

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This is an impressive feat, but it is also important to note that while in this suspended animation the weta’s heart and brain dies then recovers upon thawing out. This bug is technically a zombie.

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The jewel wasp is a solitary wasp that is known for its bizarre reproductive practice. The wasp stings a roach, herds it like a sheep into its nest, and then proceeds to lay an egg on the roach’s abdomen so its little baby will have plenty to eat upon hatching. So how does this relate to zombies?

The jewel wasp systematically stings the roach in the abdomen. This temporarily paralyzes the roach’s front legs so the wasp can now finish its work. Next, the wasp stings the roach in the brain. The venom of the wasp then disables the roach’s escape reflex getting rid of the cockroach’s will to live.

The wasp has created a zombie roach, but it is not done. Eventually the roach can walk again, but now has no desire to run from the wasp. The wasp then begins walking the roach like dog using the roach’s antenna as a leash. What happens next is perhaps best described by science writer Robert Zimmer: “The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp’s burrow.” Once there the roach allows the wasp to lay an egg on its abdomen. Then the zombified cockroach quietly sits in the wasps burrow and awaits the egg to hatch. Once the egg hatches, the wasp larva will live inside the roach until it emerges from it as an adult. Good luck getting to sleep tonight…

In the movie Alien, The extraterrestrial species featured lives out a larvae stage inside a host until it reaches another stage and bursts free from the host. What if I told you that Alien is based on a true story and the true story is a bit more horrifying than what was featured in the movie?

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Glyptapanteles is a species of wasp that lays its eggs, sometimes as many as 80 at a time, inside a caterpillar, and to ensure that the caterpillar’s red blood cells does not kill the larvae, the mother wasp also injects a virus that occurs naturally in their bodies into the caterpillar, disabling its immune system. The larvae are then free to grow and they eventually chew their way out of the caterpillar. It gets better.

The caterpillar does not die. Instead it spins a coocoon over the wasp larvae to protect them so they can finish developing. The caterpillar also sticks around and protects the cocoon from danger. It’s as if the larvae are somehow controlling the caterpillar’s actions. Even more eerie is that the caterpillar dies at almost the same exact time the adult wasps emerge.

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I don’t mean metaphorical human zombies like in the sense that we are all zombies because we lumber about our daily routines, go to our nine-five jobs, come home, go to bed, and repete. Even though that is a great subject for a poem, I mean literal human zombies!

Clairvius Narcisse was a Haitian man who was declared dead on May 2, 1962. His two sisters, Marie Claire and Angelina, buried him in a small cemetery near his hometown. 18 years pass and his family has carried on with their lives. Angelina is in the marketplace of her village when her deceased brother approaches her and introduces himself. How is this possible?

Certain kinds of poisons, like the secretion of a Japanese blowfish, can put someone in a comatose state and make them appear dead even to a doctor. Narcisse had ingested some poison like this and when he slipped into his death-like state was buried. Then someone came and dug him up. Upon awakening he was giving doses of a “zombie powder” which contained the drug Datura stramonium. The drug puts the user in an emotionless, trance-like state, but the user can still perform menial tasks. In Narcisse’s case he was used as slave labor on a sugar plantation. He was a zombie-slave for 18 years.

You don’t like zombies of the voodoo variety? Are you disappointed because when you read “Zombie Humans” you were hoping for overly aggressive, mindless killing machine as seen in almost every zombie movie since Night Of The Living Dead (1968)? Well don’t worry because human zombies like that are not out of the realm of possibility.

Seretonin is a chemical in our brain that helps keep us calm, but according to one scientific study done with mice, it also keeps us from being aggressive killing machines. A group of scientists created a group of mutant mice whose brains lacked the receptors to process seratonin and this resulted in the mice acting overly aggressive toward other organisms. Now Imagine a virus with the ability to prevent human brains from processing seratonin.

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You could also imagine a parasite that takes control of our brain and makes us do unimaginable things. Not possible you say? Evolution tells us otherwise. Spinochordodes tellinii is a parasite that gets inside grasshoppers and releases a protein that interferes with their brain and makes them commit suicide by downing. Euhaplorchis californiensis gets inside the brain of killi fish and makes them swim and flop around on the surface of the water so it is more likely for it to get eaten by a bird. There is also a parasite that some scientists believe already changes human behavior.

Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that is normally found in cats. It gets there by getting into rats through the filth they eat. It affects the rat’s behavior by making them friendlier toward cats so they are more likely to be eaten by said cats. Once inside the cats it begins reproducing (sounds like a morbid Dr. Seuss book). The parasite also gets inside humans and causes no physically harmful effects, but according to one psychological study it does change our personality. The study found that people tend to get more insecure when infected with the parasite (perhaps this explains emo kids). It also changed the personalities of men and women differently. It made men more jealous and suspicious and made women more affectionate.