We recently became e-readers, by this we don’t mean reading devices, but people who read on reading devices. Having resisted the transition from traditional books, we have been surprised how pleasant the switch has been. Apart from not being quite sure that what we are reading and absorbing are actual books – they have no […]

What we have been asking as we edit various memoirs lately is: Who? Recently, a number of them contain only one named character, the person whose moniker appears on the title page after the preposition, by. No one else in these books has a name. Instead, they are full of characters like my mother, my […]

We have been watching AMC’s “The Killing,” the murder mystery television series set in Seattle. And we have been struck by the endless rain and how it feeds the feeling of gloom that pervades the story – and brilliantly characterizes the city. We come away with a definite sense (accurate or not, the series was […]

Thanksgiving may have begun with the pilgrims in 1621, but it wasn’t an official observation until 1863 when, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued a presidential proclamation: “I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those […]

Something we do a lot as editors is cut meaningless phrases and word out of various manuscripts. As a result, we have some pronounced ideas about phrases that can just be eliminated from books altogether. Here are some examples: As fate would have it Fate always has it. There seems little point in telling the […]

When Ernest Hemingway advocated short sentences – first on his list of four good-writing rules – he wasn’t advocating a drum roll of facts. On the contrary, his short statements omitted as much as they revealed which is exactly what gave them substance and depth. To illustrate his point, Hemingway once told a story in […]

If you want to write something with a better-than-average chance of selling, you can do worse than take a stab at the horror genre. Today’s readers really, really like to be scared. In the past twenty years, more horror novels have been published than in the previous 650 years since the invention of the printing […]

It seems to us that a good relationship between author and writer is critical to writing a good how-to book. Why would readers follow advice in a book if they did not feel like they liked and trusted the author? If you want to write such a book, it is a good idea to be […]

This past holiday weekend, we stopped for a night in very-historic Burlington, New Jersey. The list of notables who have darkened various doors in Burlington include Ulysses S. Grant, whose family spent the war in Burlington; Benjamin Franklin, whose son was the last NJ royal governor; and James Fenimore Cooper, who was born there. While […]