Creativity Rules: a Writer's Workbook

Book Description

Beginning or completing any writing project can be highly daunting work. Faced with the often terrifying blank page, many writers find themselves frozen by indecision and doubt. Creativity Rules! addresses these anxieties-and the whole writing process-through an extensive series of engaging exercises that allow the writer to break down a project into a collection of not-so-daunting "tasks" that put the writer directly and quickly into the act of writing. Unlike many current books on the process of writing, Creativity Rules! transcends dry-as-dust formulas or off-in-the-ether philosophies. It's a practical, witty and inviting kick in the pants that helps the writer approach a seemingly unconquerable project with a handy fistful of powerful, proven, nuts-and-bolts writing strategies that encourage creative flights of fancy. From assessing what the writer wishes to accomplish through conceiving, outlining and developing a story, Creativity Rules! provides sound, easily accessed tactics and exercises that are designed to make the act of writing both joyous and pain free. AUTHORBIOJohn Vorhaus is a Los Angeles-based writer and the author of The Comic Toolbox (see our backlist), a popular book on comedy writing. Among his television writing credits are The Wonder Years, The Sentinel, Married...with Children, Viper and The Flash. Among the institutions where he has lectured on writing are Northwestern University, the American Film Institute, UCLA Extension, the BBC and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. His serial novel, World Series of Murder, is currently being published in Poker Digest magazine.

Customer Reviews:

In a class by himself.......2004-10-25

No one writes like Vorhaus. His books are practical, funny, and they provide actionable techniques developed by professional working writers, not academics. I was feeling stuck and despairing before I revisited "Creativity Rules!" and now I'm back on track, generating ideas for characters, plots, etc. Vorhaus' genius lies in isolating techniques, breaking them down to small chunks that even a blockhead like me can understand. He then has you drill those chunks until you get fluent with them. Eminently useful and a pleasure to read. Not recommended for people who "would like to write someday"--this book is meant to be used by writers who write.

This is it!.......2003-08-14

I can't tell you how long I've been looking for this kind of information. All the theory I've read about stories seemed to make perfectly good sense until I sit down to actually write a solid story on my own. Then I suddenly start drowning in my own words, feeling often as though I am losing my mind (I'm not joking). This book holds all those insights and keys to good writing that have been eluding me for so long. And it's so simple! All I can say is bless this guy's soul for sharing this with the world. I cannot praise Vorhaus and his ridiculously simple book enough!

P.S. Another good book (especially for the intricacies of weaving a complex story) is Building Better Plots, by Robert Kernen.

A Must Read.......2002-08-04

"Creativity Rules" covers the fundamentals of writing compelling fiction and will absolutely unlock more of your creative potential. This book successfully teaches how to be more creative AND shows exactly how to flesh out the ideas into good stories.

John Vorhaus's books on writing are some of the only ones worth reading. Every writer owes it to himself and his readers to get this awesome tutorial.

For me, very helpful!.......2001-09-21

I recieved this book as a gift (Thank you, Raxum!) and from the first few minutes I worked from it, I was scribbling away.... not exactly "filling pages" yet, but writing SOMETHING. It's more than I've done in a long time.
The book is written in a style that makes sense and leaves me wanting to try out the ideas, to see if they WILL work for me.
Overall, I find it a great and fun book to work with.

Get! See! Do!.......2001-08-14

I have shelves and shelves of books on writer's techniques, the writer's life, writer's dreams, writer's habits, overcoming writer's block, etc., etc., etc. They are on my shelves because after I read them, that's where I put them. Creativity Rules! does not share space with those books. It's on my desk next to my writing spiral. It's like a basic fiction writing class in which the author speaks in a soothing voice--low and encouraging. Each tiny lesson builds on the tiny lesson before it, and before you know it, you've got some ideas and then a sentence or two and then - what's this? - a story. If you've been dissatisfied with other how-to books, give this one a try. You'll be writing before you know what hit you.

Book Description

Arranged for Easy Guitar Tablature & Standard Notation.

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The New Best of the Doobie Brothers

Manufacturer: Alfred Publishing Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

Arranged for Piano/Guitar/Chords with Lyrics. Great Doobie Brothers songs in this collection.

Average customer rating:

Good concept, could have more material

For the serious student only!

Excelling at Technical Chess: Learn to Identify and Exploit Small Advantages
Jacob Aagaard
Manufacturer: Everyman Chess
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Chess | Board Games | Puzzles & Games | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
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Excelling at Chess Calculation: Capitalizing on Tactical Chances

Excelling at Positional Chess (Everyman Chess)

Excelling at Combinational Play: Learn to Identify and Exploit Tactical Chances

Excelling at Chess (Everyman Chess)

Mastering the Chess Openings: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Modern Chess Openings, Volume 1

ASIN: 1857443640

Book Description

In this book Jacob Aagaard studies the valuable skill of chess technique. He arms the reader with several endgame weapons that every strong technical player has in his toolbox. These include important skills such as schematic thinking, domination, preventing counterplay, building fortresses and utilizing zugzwang. These tools are illustrated in deeply analyzed games containing numerous different themes. A serious study of this book will ensure that the reader no longer need fear the word "technique"!

Customer Reviews:

Good concept, could have more material.......2005-07-06

I like the idea of this book very much, it has well thought out topic and well organized content. There are not so many books teaching how to play complex multi-pieces endings and this book fills this niche very well.

There could be a bit more examples, many important concepts are illustrated just by one or two games, moreover not all illustrative games match the subject they illustrate perfectly. More short examples (from real games or especially prepared, I do not bother) would make this book better.

Minor but very irritating feature of Aagaard books (present both here and in Excelling at Chess Calculation) is repeatable theme
of criticizing or applauding other chessbook authors. Those notes add no value to the book, interrupt the thread of reasoning and just eat the valuable space.

For the serious student only!.......2005-02-23

Jacob Aagard is possibly the best chess teacher currently being published - better than Dvoretsky for those of us not yet at master level. His explanations are to the point, and his examples are both fresh and lucid. However, you must be a reasonably strong player to get the full benefit of his works (at least 1600 ELO USCF generally, possibly 1800 for this particular book). This text will help give you the technical foundation required to achieve a master's rating. Beyond that, I have found that it has affected other aspects of my game. I have found myself considering endgame issues in the middlegame, giving me more confidence to enter a particular line because I can see how the resulting pawn structure and piece placements work to my advantage. He stresses concrete thinking while using general rules to help guide your thoughts. His books are well written (although the publisher could have done a better job picking out typos), but are not intended for fun. Skip this book unless you are serious about chess!

Amazon.com

On September 23, 1998, the boardroom of the New York Fed was a tense place. Around the table sat the heads of every major Wall Street bank, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, and representatives from numerous European banks, each of whom had been summoned to discuss a highly unusual prospect: rescuing what had, until then, been the envy of them all, the extraordinarily successful bond-trading firm of Long-Term Capital Management. Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed is the gripping story of the Fed's unprecedented move, the incredible heights reached by LTCM, and the firm's eventual dramatic demise.

Lowenstein, a financial journalist and author of Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, examines the personalities, academic experts, and professional relationships at LTCM and uncovers the layers of numbers behind its roller-coaster ride with the precision of a skilled surgeon. The fund's enigmatic founder, John Meriwether, spent almost 20 years at Salomon Brothers, where he formed its renowned Arbitrage Group by hiring academia's top financial economists. Though Meriwether left Salomon under a cloud of the SEC's wrath, he leapt into his next venture with ease and enticed most of his former Salomon hires--and eventually even David Mullins, the former vice chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve--to join him in starting a hedge fund that would beat all hedge funds.

LTCM began trading in 1994, after completing a road show that, despite the Ph.D.-touting partners' lack of social skills and their disdainful condescension of potential investors who couldn't rise to their intellectual level, netted a whopping $1.25 billion. The fund would seek to earn a tiny spread on thousands of trades, "as if it were vacuuming nickels that others couldn't see," in the words of one of its Nobel laureate partners, Myron Scholes. And nickels it found. In its first two years, LTCM earned $1.6 billion, profits that exceeded 40 percent even after the partners' hefty cuts. By the spring of 1996, it was holding $140 billion in assets. But the end was soon in sight, and Lowenstein's detailed account of each successively worse month of 1998, culminating in a disastrous August and the partners' subsequent panicked moves, is riveting.

The arbitrageur's world is a complicated one, and it might have served Lowenstein well to slow down and explain in greater detail the complex terms of the more exotic species of investment flora that cram the book's pages. However, much of the intrigue of the Long-Term story lies in its dizzying pace (not to mention the dizzying amounts of money won and lost in the fund's short lifespan). Lowenstein's smooth, conversational but equally urgent tone carries it along well. The book is a compelling read for those who've always wondered what lay behind the Fed's controversial involvement with the LTCM hedge-fund debacle. --S. Ketchum

Book Description

John Meriwether, a famously successful Wall Street trader, spent the 1980s as a partner at Salomon Brothers, establishing the best--and the brainiest--bond arbitrage group in the world. A mysterious and shy midwesterner, he knitted together a group of Ph.D.-certified arbitrageurs who rewarded him with filial devotion and fabulous profits. Then, in 1991, in the wake of a scandal involving one of his traders, Meriwether abruptly resigned. For two years, his fiercely loyal team--convinced that the chief had been unfairly victimized--plotted their boss's return. Then, in 1993, Meriwether made a historic offer. He gathered together his former disciples and a handful of supereconomists from academia and proposed that they become partners in a new hedge fund different from any Wall Street had ever seen. And so Long-Term Capital Management was born.
        In a decade that had seen the longest and most rewarding bull market in history, hedge funds were the ne plus ultra of investments: discreet, private clubs limited to those rich enough to pony up millions. They promised that the investors' money would be placed in a variety of trades simultaneously--a "hedging" strategy designed to minimize the possibility of loss. At Long-Term, Meriwether & Co. truly believed that their finely tuned computer models had tamed the genie of risk, and would allow them to bet on the future with near mathematical certainty. And thanks to their cast--which included a pair of future Nobel Prize winners--investors believed them.
        From the moment Long-Term opened their offices in posh Greenwich, Connecticut, miles from the pandemonium of Wall Street, it was clear that this would be a hedge fund apart from all others. Though they viewed the big Wall Street investment banks with disdain, so great was Long-Term's aura that these very banks lined up to provide the firm with financing, and on the very sweetest of terms. So self-certain were Long-Term's traders that they borrowed with little concern about the leverage. At first, Long-Term's models stayed on script, and this new gold standard in hedge funds boasted such incredible returns that private investors and even central banks clamored to invest more money. It seemed the geniuses in Greenwich couldn't lose.
        Four years later, when a default in Russia set off a global storm that Long-Term's models hadn't anticipated, its supposedly safe portfolios imploded. In five weeks, the professors went from mega-rich geniuses to discredited failures. With the firm about to go under, its staggering $100 billion balance sheet threatened to drag down markets around the world. At the eleventh hour, fearing that the financial system of the world was in peril, the Federal Reserve Bank hastily summoned Wall Street's leading banks to underwrite a bailout.
        Roger Lowenstein, the bestselling author of Buffett, captures Long-Term's roller-coaster ride in gripping detail. Drawing on confidential internal memos and interviews with dozens of key players, Lowenstein crafts a story that reads like a first-rate thriller from beginning to end. He explains not just how the fund made and lost its money, but what it was about the personalities of Long-Term's partners, the arrogance of their mathematical certainties, and the late-nineties culture of Wall Street that made it all possible.
        When Genius Failed is the cautionary financial tale of our time, the gripping saga of what happened when an elite group of investors believed they could actually deconstruct risk and use virtually limitless leverage to create limitless wealth. In Roger Lowenstein's hands, it is a brilliant tale peppered with fast money, vivid characters, and high drama.

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Customer Reviews:

great book.......2007-09-20

Great read. Didn't want to put it down and finished it in a few days. Great to read how these smart guys lost all their money by being too greedy. Thumbs up for sure.

A fantastic tale of risk, reward and rue.......2007-09-20

It's a wonderfully written account of a remarkable risk taking adventrue crafted by the best of wall street's arbitrage mavens and acclaimed academic laureates. Author has done a supreb job as a slueth who followed the trail that aparantly divulged very little about its journey into the financial debacle that could've brought the whole financial world down. Throughout the work of the author, one can perceive the vastness of his research into this matter, his depth of knowledge in the world of arbitrage and his exquisite story telling skill.

He portrayed each character with great care that went above and beyond what I expected. Though at times the deatils seemed a bit overwhelming and unnecessary, it was enjoyable nonetheless.
Besides gaining a great deal of knowledge about bond trading, risk arbitrage and about all the parties associated with it, it also gave me a good picture about the human inter-relations that plays into the rise and fall of such wall street ventures. One thing I wanted to see in this book is Greenspan's involvement and opinion on this. But, not sure why his role in the shoring up of LTCM wasn't covered. I earlier read a book on Greenspan where his rebuttal on the criticism of Fed's involvement with the bail out LTCM was deatiled. I expected Lowenstein to cover this as well.

I first came across the story of LTCM from Taleb's "Black Swan", then went to wikipedia to know more about it, and finally got a hold of this book and I'm glad that I did. I love real life stories where turns of events and drama unfold from the work of an invisible hand, not from that of a gifted writer. I would love to see the story of LTCM on big screen one of these days. I caught a glimse of the NOVA's episode "The Trillion Dollar Bet [2000]" which covered LTCM, but I couldn't get a hold of the full content.

It's a must read for anyone who has interest in wall street, business, risk and how they all work. Lowenstein is a great writer in my opinion and I will move on to reading his pervious work on Buffet.

Great insight into market movements.......2007-09-12

The LTCM story is fascinating, and Lowenstein makes clear enough what kind of 'hedging' they were doing. The most valuable details to me were the intertwining of instituions and trades. I thought it illuminated how forced trading and fear can spread. Also captures the mood of the nineties well, I'd like to find detailed history of other market eras.
And from an academic viewpoint, his discussion of 'fat tails' was great.

Playing Dice With The Universe.......2007-09-08

Like the RMS Titanic, Long-Term Capital Management was the engineering miracle of its day, designed to ride an ocean of volatility and liquidity in high style. Like the Titanic, LTCM became a shibboleth for catastrophe. Roger Lowenstein's "When Genius Failed" takes you along for the hedge fund's short, ill-fated ride.

Published in 2000, two years after Long-Term's collapse necessitated a Fed-encouraged bailout to forestall a second Great Depression, "When Genius Failed" makes macro economics almost readable. It also makes the somewhat incomprehensible details of Long-Term's management and breakdown very understandable to laypeople like me.

The central idea of Long-Term, formed early on when they were active mostly in the fixed income market, was that value spreads between various financial vehicles, say a pair of related bonds or derivatives, could be tracked by computer and calculated with minute precision, thus allowing a speculator to bet on the expected difference. Being right was thus not a challenge, it was only the ability to put down enough money on your bets to make the game worthwhile. Long-Term started out with enough money, and quickly accumulated more, though the fact this money was not theirs was a large part of their problem.

"Backed by their models, they felt more certain than others did - almost invincible," Lowenstein writes. "Given enough time, given enough capital, the young geniuses...felt they could do no wrong, and Meriwether...began to believe the geniuses were right."

"Meriwether" is John Meriwether, the founder and managing partner of Long-Term Capital Management. As described by Lowenstein, he was not the greediest or most self-promotional guy, cautioning associates in one instance that dickering about profit-enhancement was a bit much given things just a few dozen city blocks away in Harlem. "J.M." liked to make his money quietly and, like his LTCM partners, didn't enjoy a particularly lavish lifestyle. But he liked being king, and with his partners ran an astonishingly callous, risk-taking business that threw its elbows about with disdain.

"The pursuit of money may have been central to their lives, but as is often the case, it went far beyond any conceivable lifestyle needs," Lowenstein writes. "The money was a scorecard, a proof of their superlative trading skills."

Many say Long-Term's fatal flaw was greed, but that's not true. What sunk them, as Lowenstein richly recounts, was hubris. Thus, when spreads narrowed and profit-making opportunities shrunk, Long-Term extended itself far more, "picking up nickels in front of bulldozers," in order to sustain their elite reputation.

Lowenstein makes the finances comprehensible and exciting. His writing is ironically drier when it comes to capturing the people and their interactions, probably hobbled by the unwillingness of many key players to talk with him. One wishes for more insight on what the partners were thinking as things fell apart and they appeared on the verge of setting off an international financial collapse.

But if sober-sided analysis of a key moment in American financial history is your cup of tea, you will want to read this sturdy primer in the extent and limits of human ego when up against the world's market forces. Hedge funds may pride themselves on daring such limits, and betting "against the gods" as it were, but "When Genius Failed" shows mortals still have a few tricks left to learn.

Day of Reckoning in Greenwich (Heimlich for Hedgies).......2007-09-03

Roger Lowenstein is one of the few current writers who can make financial stories interesting; he has also written for the Wall Street Journal and a biography of uber-investor Warren Buffett.

In some ways this book is an update on characters we first met in Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker. John Meriwether was drummed out of Salomon for not adequately supervising the bond desk, where a trader was regularly telling fibs to the Fed. Of course, Wall Street is loaded with second acts and Meriwether re-assembles his gang of boy-geniuses and know-it-all professors at his own shop, LTCM. Every one on Wall Street knew that his team made the money for Salomon, so a frenzy begins over who can give him the most money to invest, with minimal interest and no collateral.

Things run well at first, profits for the fund soar for a few years. Then as is inevitable, others copy the strategies. It is really not complicated, you just need all the liquidity, market intelligence, and cojones in the world. Eventually the return on these initial winning plays trends down to the cost of capital, so LTCM starts to chase riskier bets to boost the returns.

Eventually things go wrong. The Nobel prize winning academicians say the fund is hedged so that it can not lose money in consecutive quarters, yet a melt-down begins. Wall Street loves the smell of blood in the water; front-runners make the situation worse, until finally a bail-out is necessary.

Warren Buffett flirts with the boys from Greenwich, but he does not consumate the deal, so it falls to a consortium of investment bankers to make an equity investment to stabilize the dizzying rate of descent. As was widely reported at the time, the Fed and the NYSE, although making no investment on their own, had to push the investment banks into doing something to save their own game.

These characters did not fade away however. John Corzine masterminded the bail-out, although he overlooked his own shop's blatant front-running and overstepped his authority to invest. After his partners at Goldman booted him in a boardroom coup, he became the governor of New Jersey and current poster boy encouraging the public to wear seat belts when speeding and driving distracted.

Buffett is still allowed to actively manage his insurance premiums, although stock holders have had some years when they questioned why. Some of the others were able to get their names in the paper once again, for tolerating market timing in mutual funds, to the obvious detriment of long term investors. Even Meriwhether has re-emerged to start another fund, no reports yet on its performance.

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management

Average customer rating:

A story of mathematical calculation vs. human unpredictability
Short Term Capital Irrationality
Quite a good book but there are better ones on that topic

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management
Roger Lowenstein
Manufacturer: Fourth Estate
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1841155047

Customer Reviews:

A story of mathematical calculation vs. human unpredictability.......2007-08-20

This classic Wall Street story is another must-read for anyone with an interest in money management. When Genius Failed chronicles the failure of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), a pioneer in quantitative investment strategies. With roots from the renowned Salomon investment bank, LTCM gathered some of the world's top financial gurus to design mathematical arbitrage strategies so well planned, they were widely regarded as having virtually no risk. Among the mathematical wizards was Myron Scholes, co-creator of the Black-Scholes model.

After several years of handsome returns, this formula turned out too good to be true. After convincing investment banks and clients to pour billions of dollars into this near-"riskless" fund, tragedy struck in 1998. A credit crisis in Asia prompted a chain reaction of panic that the fund's mathematical models could not anticipate. The story of this fund's collapse proves that markets are not efficient. It is a lesson that precision calculations in the world of finance, no matter how correct or ingenious, are no match for human irrationality when panic strikes.

Amplifying the unforeseen risk of the fund were human errors made by the principals. The firm's superior performance depended on incredible leverage (borrowed money), but that leverage also led to LTCM's demise when the margin calls hit. The principals also deviated from their core investment strategy when arbitrage opportunities started to dry up; they began making directional bets and speculating, something for which mathematical models are just inadequate for quantifying the risk.

One disadvantage of this book is that it focuses so much on the people involved that it sacrifices explanation of the market forces behind the Asian currency crisis. I felt that some chapters contained too many dry details on the interaction between the LTCM principals and the banks.

The advantage of its focus on people is that the reader can see many of today's Wall Street icons in action. Almost a continuation of Liar's Poker, many of the same Salomon traders including John Meriwether are pivotal to LTCM. Warren Buffett and George Soros play a role, allowing readers to see their investment acumen at work. Many Wall Street characters and investment banks still prevalent in today's news were plugged into the LTCM fiasco.

Because of the high-profile characters and Wall Street firms involved with LTCM, this is a great read for students aspiring for a career on the Street. It also provides good insight into trading strategies and the hedge fund world. I would recommend When Genius Failed to anyone with an interest in investing.

Short Term Capital Irrationality.......2007-04-23

Roger Lowenstein details how the partners of "Long Term Capital Management" let greed and ego overwhelm them.

LTCM was a hedge fund that was supposed to use arbitage to make money at low risk. It worked for a while, but then lots of people started getting in on the act. The rational thing to do, under the circumstances, would have been to cut back, and look for a new fields of endevour. Instead, the partners of LTCM decided to screw their investors. They returned most of the investor's capital, and then made even bigger bets with oodles of borrowed money, so they could hog all the profits for themselves.

And then, something happened, as it always does. Suddenly, all LTCM's positions were losing money. Being 'geniuses,' they doubled down, and lost it all. In a page out of Greek tragedy, they would have rode out the storm fine, if they hadn't forced their former investors to take back all their capital. As it was, the former investors profited greatly, while the geniuses lost almost everything and nearly destroyed Wall Street.

If ever you hear someone talking about how markets are "efficient," give them this, which shows how the emotional human animal REALLY behaves in the financial world.

Quite a good book but there are better ones on that topic.......2006-05-12

This is quite an entertaining book on the failure of LTCM. It is well documented but I think it will be much more appreciated by the outsiders to the realm of Finance.

It disappointed me on two accounts:

First, it is another one of those typical American business storytelling books where you have to read through bios of the lives of all characters before you ever get to the meat of the subject (e.g. Barbarians at the Gate)

Second, the book "Inventing Money" by N. Dunbar is in my view a much better account of the LTCM downfall if you have been studying economics and finance as it describes the mechanics a lot more.

Nevertheless, the book tells the story quite well and I would highly recommend, by the same author, "Buffett : The Making of an American Capitalist".

Average customer rating:

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management
Roger Lowenstein
Manufacturer: Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000K1FGAI

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