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 […]
Most of the books we edit are shorter when we are finished with them than 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 […]
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 […]
In the latest New Yorker Magazine, author Jonathan Franzen writes that a fiction author’s body of work is a mirror of that writer’s character. This does not mean that fiction writers are necessarily writing about themselves or using biographical details from their own lives. What Franzen is saying is that the choices a writer makes […]
Life doesn’t always provide us with the opportunity to write the book we have dreamed of. A number of people in our writing community have told us that they are taking time while they are unemployed from non-writing jobs to work on their writing. We applaud them. While there is nothing good about unemployment, there […]
From the Bengal tiger in LIFE OF PI to Rudyard Kipling’s Shere Khan in THE JUNGLE BOOK to Tony the Tiger of Frosted Flakes fame, the tiger is among the most pre-eminent of literary (and sometimes not so literary) symbols. Poet William Blake nails the tiger’s perfect symbol-ness in “The Tyger” (1797) when he describes […]
Everybody we know is reading DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLY, P.D. James’ sequel to Jane Austen’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE which is number three on the New York Times bestseller list this week. Well-known detective writer James has said this work is a combination of her two greatest passions, crime stories and Austen, a one/two punch which […]
We have book doctored and/or edited some wonderful books this year. We have traveled from Iraq, to Zimbabwe, to Tibet in the 1950s, to WW II Poland, to the Civil War, to early 20th-century Afghanistan through our clients’ works – and it has been quite a ride. We have learned about surviving the 1958 Lebanese […]