"Who is John Galt?"
8 Effective Writing Techiques in Atlas Shrugged
"In the midst of my absence last month, I managed to squeeze in some time to read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. It was only 1000 pages of very fine print - no problem! I had been meaning to read the book for years. I once knew a certain female executive whose passion for work knew no bounds and who once admitted to me that the source of much of her passion came from Atlas Shrugged. I once played Bioshock on my laptop. The entire backstory and characters involved in the underwater city of Rapture were based upon the ideas of Atlas Shrugged. There are many references in the game to Ayn Rand's story and characters and even Ayn Rand herself. I also read Francis Ford Coppola's unproduced years-in-the-making epic script, Megalopolis, which Coppola said was influenced by Atlas Shrugged.
"In any case, I could not put the book down. I flew through the thousand pages without a sweat. It's amazing to me how on the one hand, some 120-page amateur screenplays require monumental acts of willpower to get through them and yet, on the other hand, there are giant, thousand-page books that are hopelessly addictive. Why is that? What is it about one story that makes it addictive and another one arduous? How can a writer hold a reader's attention so intensely for so many pages?"
From a new article by me, which can be found here.
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