When people meet you online it is similar to meeting you in person for the first time. They want to understand you and understand you fairly quickly. What they are understanding is your persona, a sense of who you are that is communicated in a quick kind of shorthand. Written by Lee Schneider Every celebrity […]
Read MoreGeorges Simenon, a prolific novelist, wrote most of his books while staying in hotel rooms. You would think that it stressed him out — he was running a tab, paying for the room. But there also was isolation and focus. There was nothing to do but write. He brought along a telephone book to help […]
Read MoreWhen writing you want perfection. You go at it draft by draft. But then something falls out. Or I, the writer, change. I read what I’ve written ten years later, something that was good then, but I am a different person now and it isn’t perfect anymore. Imperfection creeps in, the silent invader who often […]
Read MoreWhen I consume an espresso quickly over the kitchen sink I experience a memory story. I am in Rome, in 1982, drinking my first stand-up espresso at a bar. It was on the Piazza Navona. Sunlight penetrated to the bright bottles of alcohol and animated the espresso machine. Men, and a few women, but mostly […]
Read MoreBulging three-ring binders. Index cards stuffed snugly into a wooden recipe box so it won’t close. Books crammed with Post-it notes. Everyone has their own way of taking and keeping notes. It’s best to make a fuss about your notes. I’ve discovered that the more convoluted your note-taking process, the better it is for you. […]
Read More500 Words is a blog about the writing process that is published on Thursdays. A documentary editor friend of mine who has a superb sense of story was telling me a story about building birdhouses. He didn’t mean it literally. He has no workshop in the way you might think. He meant that each film […]
Read More500 Words is a blog about the writing process that is published on Thursdays. If you are stuck in writing hell (it happens) or are stalled as you try to start something new, there is nothing better than the handwritten brain dump. It’s better than scrolling through Twitter, better than typing, better than eating a […]
Read More500 Words is a blog about the writing process that is published on Thursdays. How to deal with too much to read? Linda Holmes, writing on the NPR website, points out reading everything you want to read is hopeless. The title of her article is fitting:“The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss […]
Read MoreSometimes you have to work on the middle first. After meticulous outlining and brilliant brainstorming, you are ready to begin writing. But you can’t. There is something holding you back. You don’t feel inspired. You think the whole idea of the project is just terrible. Then it’s good to begin in the middle. Start at […]
Read More500 Words is a blog about the writing process that is published on Thursdays. The legs move and the mind turns. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book for generating new ideas and a fresh perspective. It’s not just the change of scenery that helps your mind cue up a new internal movie. […]
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