writing

205 posts

1. Is this thing on? December 13, 2022
2. What Do We Mean When We Call Art ‘Necessary’? January 29, 2019
3. I Move to Keep Things Whole January 13, 2018
4. Why Walking Helps Us Think January 4, 2018
5. My Writing Education: A Time Line - The New Yorker November 20, 2015
6. Why is English so weirdly different from other languages? by John McWhorter — Aeon November 19, 2015
7. Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas November 5, 2015
8. The first draft is always perfect September 14, 2015
9. Thrillers June 9, 2015
10. The New Yorker’s Susan Orlean on the magic and mystery of writing May 9, 2015
11. Why Everyone's Saying 'YAAAAAASSSSSS' Now April 22, 2015
12. I’ve had my dictaphone since the mid-to-late ’90s March 10, 2015
13. Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 158, Shelby Foote February 5, 2015
14. Since my son was born I realized: soon, he’ll be three-and-a-half November 18, 2014
15. Write a Damn Blog (with tweets) · funkaoshi · Storify November 11, 2014
16. Ten Short Rants About #GamerGate | Popehat November 9, 2014
17. Decoding a Menu at Root & Bone - NYTimes.com September 29, 2014
18. The Internet Has a Problem(atic) - The Awl September 29, 2014
19. Against “Against [X]” - The New Yorker August 30, 2014
20. The Cold Stoicism of Advice Columns for Men August 5, 2014
21. Nicely Said: Writing for the Web with Style and Purpose (review) July 23, 2014
22. Literature’s basic charge is to describe being in the world July 20, 2014
23. The Joy of Typing June 22, 2014
24. M: Roger Angell, A Hall-of-Famer at 93 June 7, 2014
25. Structure March 27, 2014
26. Concealing what is shameful to you will never lead to anything of value March 11, 2014
27. Anorexia, the Impossible Subject December 16, 2013
28. Critical thinking #4: Daniel Mendelsohn December 6, 2013
29. Man vs. Corpse November 18, 2013
30. Schulz on the Terrors, Pleasures of Robert Frost -- Vulture November 15, 2013
31. The Arts - €”Agents of Change and Source of Enchantment | Catholic World Report October 28, 2013
32. Cormac McCarthy's Vocabulary Is Better Than Yours: Blood Meridian {spoilers!} August 10, 2013
33. Two New Books About Jorge Luis Borges : The New Yorker August 2, 2013
34. Borges and the Sharknado Problem July 29, 2013
35. bookforum talks with karl ove knausgaard - bookforum.com / interviews July 8, 2013
36. Jorge Luis Borges takes a leak June 14, 2013
37. It’s so hard with a word processor to know what a revision is April 30, 2013
38. Nieman Reports | ‘Writing is all about rewriting, which means you’ve got to get something down.’ February 26, 2013
39. My Perfect Adventure: Frugal Traveler Columnist Seth Kugel | My Perfect Adventure | OutsideOnline.com February 13, 2013
40. This stupid script is one of your best friends January 28, 2013
41. A Wealth of Words by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., City Journal WInter 2013 January 28, 2013
42. Everybody talks about the writer’s feeling and expression January 23, 2013
43. George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year - NYTimes.com January 7, 2013
44. When Bram Met Walt | Humanities December 28, 2012
45. The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film December 27, 2012
46. Los Angeles Review of Books - What Would DFW Do: Maria Bustillos, Eric Been, And Mike Goetzman On "Both Flesh And Not" And All Things Foster Wallace November 26, 2012
47. Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don't Understand by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – review | The Guardian November 25, 2012
48. Every whole person understands his lifetime as an organized story November 20, 2012
49. Who will write the last tweet? November 8, 2012
50. n+1: Money September 7, 2012
51. Random! Postmodern Bio Blurbs » 3:AM Magazine September 5, 2012
52. Punctuation Marks by Theodor Adorno [pdf] August 28, 2012
53. Chiasmus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia August 16, 2012
54. You can never be both a writer and a politician – at least not a good writer August 7, 2012
55. Felix: The weird NYT apologetic boast July 29, 2012
56. Forms, styles, and structures should change like skirt lengths July 11, 2012
57. The novels we know best have an architecture July 9, 2012
58. The Four Deadly Fallacies, Pathetic and Otherwise June 21, 2012
59. Zing!: What the New Science of the New Sciences Tells Us About Our Unquenchable Craving for the Illusion of Scientifically-Validated Insight | The Moral Sciences Club | Big Think June 13, 2012
60. What we call a home May 20, 2012
61. I quit my advertising job so I could go to the movies every afternoon May 14, 2012
62. Complete text of an invitation to a friend's party last Friday night May 7, 2012
63. Metaphors We Live By - George Lakoff and Mark Johnson [pdf] April 18, 2012
64. The New Kendrick Lamar/Dr. Dre Song, and Other Examples of Egregiously Obvious Ghostwriting - Grantland April 4, 2012
65. A book exists at the intersection of the author’s subconscious and the reader March 6, 2012
66. Writers, it seems to me, should write, not make speeches March 2, 2012
67. A peculiar exercise from early in my fiction-writing career March 1, 2012
68. Writers are shaped by their general experience of fiction February 27, 2012
69. Steal Like An Artist Reviews - What People Are Saying February 27, 2012
70. The New World of William Carlos Williams by Adam Kirsch | The New York Review of Books February 14, 2012
71. I’m not very interested in political satire February 6, 2012
72. The long sentence is how we begin to free ourselves January 21, 2012
73. In which teenage Ben Franklin improves his writing by imitation September 26, 2011
74. Every Work of Art Is a Game Played Out at the Worktable September 22, 2011
75. Southern American English - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia September 21, 2011
76. Flyer in a bus-station rack September 12, 2011
77. The syllabus to an English class at Rutgers September 5, 2011
78. collision detection: The art of public thinking September 1, 2011
79. The pretender: Dana Spiotta's persuasive performances—By Jonathan Dee (Harper's Magazine) August 29, 2011
80. An able reader often discovers in other men’s writings perfections beyond… August 29, 2011
81. Laurence Sterne diagrams the first five volumes of Tristram Shandy August 29, 2011
82. There are cases were poetry creates itself August 25, 2011
83. The Smart Set: On the Road Again - July 29, 2011 August 4, 2011
84. Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant… August 3, 2011
85. Art Bollocks - Bryan Ashbee July 27, 2011
86. When we get better at expressiveness, we get better at understanding, better… July 4, 2011
87. Portrait Of The Bagel As A Young Man June 24, 2011
88. Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism - The Atlantic May 11, 2011
89. Once death is invoked, the choice of who must die may seem oddly arbitrary May 9, 2011
90. Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library | The Awl May 9, 2011
91. Does the Novel Have a Future? The Answer Is In This Essay! April 26, 2011
92. I haven’t had trouble with writer’s block March 25, 2011
93. Behind the Paywall: How New York Times Articles End | VF Daily | Vanity Fair March 18, 2011
94. Before we learned to tell stories, we learned to read them March 3, 2011
95. Marginal Revolution: The quality of fiction vs. the quality of non-fiction March 3, 2011
96. The Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator February 8, 2011
97. You can tell when rhetoric is empty — and therefore should be cut — because it… February 3, 2011
98. The Problem With Memoirs - NYTimes.com January 31, 2011
99. The Simple Art of Murder - Raymond Chandler January 15, 2011
100. Raymond Chandler - The Simple Art of Murder January 15, 2011
101. List of fictional elements, materials, isotopes and atomic particles - Wikipedia January 11, 2011
102. List of fictional elements, materials, isotopes and atomic particles - Wikipedia January 10, 2011
103. Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee November 22, 2010
104. Paris Review - The Art of Poetry No. 30, Philip Larkin November 22, 2010
105. Purloined Letters: Are we too quick to denounce plagiarism? November 21, 2010
106. The Shadow Scholar: The man who writes your students' papers tells his story - The Chronicle of Higher Education November 13, 2010
107. Monty Python - Novel Writing November 8, 2010
108. The End of the Story - The Believer October 25, 2010
109. The rejection slip Essanay Film Manufacturing Company (1907-1925), a motion… October 22, 2010
110. Norman Einstein’s Sports & Rocket Science Monthly #17: October 2010 October 1, 2010
111. All Paris Review Interviews Now Online (!!!) September 20, 2010
112. I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author September 16, 2010
113. Texas Poet Twists Newsprint Into Prose - NewsHour Poetry Series - The Poetry… September 16, 2010
114. Happy endings in life, and in fiction too perhaps, are really about where you… September 6, 2010
115. TMR: An Interview with George Saunders August 26, 2010
116. When you think about it, rules for drinking are not so different from rules… August 4, 2010
117. Death is Not the End - David Foster Wallace: His Legacy and his Critics - The Point Magazine July 13, 2010
118. On The Art Of Fiction - Willa Cather July 8, 2010
119. To Invigorate Literary Mind, Start Moving Literary Feet June 22, 2010
120. Interview with Joyce Carol Oates | Arch Literary Journal June 22, 2010
121. "Somewhere a Dog Barked" - By Rosecrans Baldwin - Slate Magazine June 17, 2010
122. Though it’s unlikely you’ll write something nobody has ever heard of, the way… May 6, 2010
123. Jack Kerouac: Essentials of Spontaneous Prose April 29, 2010
124. kerouac's rules for spontaneous prose April 13, 2010
125. What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit—to sit, clench… April 1, 2010
126. Working Methods - Art - Lapham’s Quarterly March 25, 2010
127. The Enthusiast - The Atlantic March 18, 2010
128. Day jobs of famous writers March 17, 2010
129. Five tips for writing non-fiction | The Undercover Economist | FT.com March 9, 2010
130. Wired for Books : Author interviews on MP3 March 4, 2010
131. Lately, I’ve been wondering if sitting quietly in a café, pretending to read… February 24, 2010
132. Consider David Foster Wallace February 4, 2010
133. Postscript: J. D. Salinger - The New Yorker January 28, 2010
134. This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post - Coyote Crossing January 28, 2010
135. Good travel writing contends honestly and openly with presumptions of who… January 11, 2010
136. Cut This Story! - The Atlantic January 5, 2010
137. The combinatorial agility of words, the exponential generation of meaning once… January 4, 2010
138. The central failure of these interviews, like so many, is that they operate… December 28, 2009
139. And sud­denly every­thing he had been doing stood up… December 28, 2009
140. Shifting Sentence Structure Alters Meaning December 9, 2009
141. A book needn’t be an author’s life work; a squib of novel insight… November 23, 2009
142. I ended up in the Southwest because I knew that nobody had ever written about… November 18, 2009
143. People Like to Be Educated About Tragedies November 5, 2009
144. The Art of Persuasive Writing highlighting selections from Bank Notes November 2, 2009
145. Writing as real-time performance « Snarkmarket October 6, 2009
146. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge September 7, 2009
147. Making the Clackity Noise August 25, 2009
148. Dinner at El Bulli: The Greatest Restaurant in the World August 12, 2009
149. It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies… July 30, 2009
150. David Foster Wallace, on success July 22, 2009
151. Chris Anderson’s Free Contains Apparent Plagiarism June 24, 2009
152. It kind of puzzles me that people seem so keen on asking fiction writers… May 20, 2009
153. 35 Variations on a Theme from Shakespeare April 15, 2009
154. Oblivion (review: 4/5) March 31, 2009
155. An interesting bit from a David Foster Wallace reading circa Infinite Jest March 31, 2009
156. The last bit from a 1993 interview with David Foster Wallace [pdf] in Whiskey… March 15, 2009
157. Dancing in the Dark: Race, Sex, the South, and Exploitative Cinema February 26, 2009
158. Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning, a short story by Donald Barthelme February 24, 2009
159. From an interview with Jimmy Carter February 24, 2009
160. Good news: back in October I wrote up my notes from Umberto Eco's lecture… January 1, 2009
161. Scandal is our growth industry November 25, 2008
162. Umberto Eco on "How I Write" October 5, 2008
163. George Carlin's last interview is really good September 2, 2008
164. Pocket Poem August 27, 2008
165. Is it harder to write a sonnet than a great hip-hop verse? August 15, 2008
166. Something to shoot for August 12, 2008
167. Hamlet, the Facebook News Feed Edition August 6, 2008
168. Why we love a good yarn August 5, 2008
169. George Orwell has a blog July 30, 2008
170. Robert Frost on creative growth July 21, 2008
171. Classical and pop reviews 2 July 13, 2008
172. Selections from a few personal ads in the New York Review of Books June 29, 2008
173. Classical vs. pop music reviews June 29, 2008
174. How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later June 18, 2008
175. Men Made Out of Words June 3, 2008
176. The New Kings of Nonfiction (review: 3/5) June 1, 2008
177. Masterpieces are not single and solitary births May 26, 2008
178. Poetry and the Microphone May 20, 2008
179. Writers really do die young May 18, 2008
180. Return to Richardson, Spring 1981 May 12, 2008
181. Then! May 7, 2008
182. interview with Richard Price in the Believer May 4, 2008
183. Against Happiness (review: 2.5/5) April 28, 2008
184. Graphing the accepted spelling of "ThunderCats, ho!" April 23, 2008
185. A collection of 100 great opening lines April 21, 2008
186. The Well-Dressed Man With A Beard April 21, 2008
187. The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2007 (review: 3.5/5) April 18, 2008
188. diagram of every sentence in On the Road April 6, 2008
189. The Thurber & White send-up on the knee phenomenon March 30, 2008
190. The seven deadly words of book reviewing March 29, 2008
191. When characters in books get hit, they tend to get hit in the solar plexus February 16, 2008
192. The Braindead Megaphone (review: 4.5/5) January 31, 2008
193. 32% of the New Yorker's fiction came from 14 different authors January 8, 2008
194. Nick Hornby interviews David Simon, of The Wire fame January 6, 2008
195. The Road (review: 5/5) December 30, 2007
196. The Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks is one of my favorite regular reads December 10, 2007
197. Paris Review Interviews, I November 29, 2007
198. A profile of William Langewiesche November 29, 2007
199. Here's an interesting idea: setting an end-date for your blog November 29, 2007
200. E.M. Forster on Story and Plot November 24, 2007
201. Reader and writer are in jail together November 23, 2007
202. In ninth grade I looked like Gollum November 8, 2007
203. Undisciplined reading November 1, 2007
204. The Elements of Style (review: 3/5) October 13, 2007
205. NaBloPoMo is the new NaNoWriMo October 30, 2006