Category: writingPage 2 of 3

Six classic wordle poets

Wordle is “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide.” Words that appear more often are presented more prominently. The site will make word clouds…

The books we need

“The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves,…

The key to being a writer

Zachart Kanin in the New Yorker .

How much of this page will you read?

According to Jacob Nielsen, in a post of nearly 500 words, such as this one, readers can be expected to spend an average of about 45 seconds on…

Overblown prose for the ages

Overblown prose often springs up exactly where you would expect to find it. But shouldn’t this extraordinary opening by Peter Hartlaub to his review of Grand Theft Auto…

Is our journalists educated?

This is pretty awesome. When Hillary challenged Barack to a “Lincoln-Douglas” style debate, Fox TV’s national news ran the following graphic. I guess they thought she said “Lincoln-Douglass.”…

Raul’s Lies

Lies I’ve told my 3 year old recently By Raul Gutierrez Trees talk to each other at night. All fish are named either Lorna or Jack. Before your…

Draft titles

Some book titles feel so much a part of their texts that that the works’ draft titles seem like oddly fitted hats, discarded in the dressing room; others…

Semi-buzz

Recently there has been an uptick in talk about semicolons. Witness: Hooray for the ; I say! A subterranean semicolon! FANBOYS and the Semicolon Colbert on punctuation How…

Hexagram 26

Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of good fiction writing

The first rule of good writing is that there are no rules. If Elmore Leonard had written Ulysses, or Metamorphosis, or Remembrance of Things Past, or Death on…

86 recommended travel books

Conde Nast commissioned a distinguished group of writers to nominate their favorite travel books. Participating authors included AndrĂ© Aciman, Monica Ali, Julia Alvarez, Tom Bissell, Geraldine Brooks, Vikram…

Style Trends in Fiction

For the past couple of years amazon.com has been including a feature it calls “text stats” on many of its book pages. Among the statistics presented are “readability…

Books for writers wrap-up

A while ago I asked for opinions about helpful books for writers and got some good responses. Commentators included Alan Bernheimer, Benjamin Chambers, Carol Peters, Christine Thomas, DMS,…

Controlled chaos and blog journalism

El Blogador at Inner Diablog (whose interesting posts I often consult in the context of my Buried Mirror research) cites Samuel Pepys and Jean Baudrillard as models for…

Joyce Carol Oates on creating characters in fiction

Ms. Oates, rambling a bit, reveals that during “the first six weeks” of a writing project she is quite miserable. This is somewhat surprising to me, because I…

What are the most helpful books about writing and publishing?

The most popular pages on this website, in terms of sheer volume of visitors, are those in my guide to getting a book published. (They account for the…

Writers’ rooms

The Guardian has an ongoing feature displaying writers’ workrooms. The common features tend to be clutter, piles of books, and undistinguished furniture. Shown is the room of AS…

Recommended reading

At Frisco Vista I’ve told the story of the Belgum Sanitarium, which was located in Wildcat Canyon above Richmond on the San Francisco Bay. It’s a romantic little…

Standards of Journalism

Print journalists criticizing bloggers is nothing new. So when Michael Skube, a journalism professor at Elon University, wrote an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, in which…

Journalistic ethics and Publishers Weekly

Ed Champion excoriates Karen Holt for writing in Publishers Weekly that includes passages such as this: There was the time at BEA when I wanted to ask Margaret…

Embedded journalism

The LAT covers the Mirthala Salinas affair. UPDATE, Nov. 18, 2007: The above link (now removed) has gone bad. Here’s a summary of the story.

Ten Steps to Better Writing

Copyblogger has posted a list of 10 steps to becoming a better writer. Here’s the link, but never mind, the full list follows: Write. Write more. Write even…

Is It Serious?

Although BoingBoing has already copied the entire article (under the heading “Ursula LeGuin rips into Slate Magazine”), this post “on serious literature,” which appears on the Ansible website,…