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Realish-ism: new literary genre or dancing around the truth?
A report in the Washington Post this morning details the soul searching National Public Radio is doing over contributor David Sedaris. Sedaris is a well-known memoirist and comic whose quirky stories about his upbringing and later life have also been best-selling books. The issue NPR is having is that it is a news organization and [...]
The Tortoise and the Binge-Writer, Race to Deadline
It will not come as news to any of you that writing is a really hard endeavor. Just about everybody agrees with that. In THE CAMBRIDGE HANDBOOK OF EXPERTISE AND EXPERT PERFORMANCE (a book that examines the scientific understanding of expertise in fifteen areas of endeavor), author Ronald Kellogg writes that serious writing requires the [...]
Think you have written a memorable line? Put it to the test:
A team of scientists at Cornell University has reviewed hundreds of famous movie quotes to find out what makes them memorable. The researchers took 1,000 well-known quotes as identified by IMDb and matched them with other quotes that have not proved as durable. The pairs of quotes came from the same movie, were spoken by [...]
The Nov-oir: is this what it is coming to?
In his new book, POCKET KINGS, Ted Heller has coined the phrase nov-oir. A combination of novel and memoir, it defines a memoiristic novel, which is to say a fictional book written in the first person as if it were a memoir. POCKET KINGS is just such a nov-oir (or mem-vel). The protagonist, Franklin W. [...]
Book Tour via Twitter
As hard as many of us work at our writing, we may never get sent on a book tour. Author Anne Lamott might well say that is a blessing. When her latest book SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED came out recently, she tweeted about the whole experience: publication, reviews and book tour. Written with her son Sam [...]
The (Neuro) Science of Good Writing
When you make an effort to use strongly evocative words in your narrative you are not just creating a richly textured piece of writing, you are also stimulating the brains of your readers. We were interested to read in the March 17th New York Times that neuroscientists are finding that reading not only activates the [...]
Nasty Little Birds, a Little Madness, and Perpetual Astonishment. Oh yeah, Spring
Here in Washington D.C. the cherry blossoms are expected to hit peak bloom this week, about two weeks earlier than the average. This is to say spring has arrived here. We have had a stretch of unusually warm weather; the trees are greening up fast; and the bulbs have popped. All of this makes it [...]
Making a list can be lazy writing unless you are going grocery shopping
Writers sometimes use lists to bring a person or place to life through a sheer abundance of detail. When they work, lists are a groundswell of images that lift and transport the reader. Below is an example from an essay in John Updike’s memoir, SELF CONSCIOUSNESS (1989): A few housefronts farther on, what had been [...]
Saying things twice and being redundant: Cut it out!
Most of the books we edit are shorter when we are finished with them then they were when we started. Cutting out extraneous words and sentences is by no means all we do, but it is almost always a part of it. Something we always try to cut is redundancy. This crops up more than [...]
What writing love scenes can teach you about writing ordinary advance-the-plot scenes
When we googled “writing, making scenes come to life,” what came up was a lot of instructions on writing love scenes. Love scenes would seem to have a fair amount of drama built in. But author Karen Wiesner seems to think they are a particular challenge – and she should know she has written almost [...]