You’ve no doubt heard about Schrödinger’s Cat. That’s the one that, hypothetically sealed in a box along with a deadly radioactive atom, may be paradoxically (and I suppose rather frighteningly to some) presumed to be both alive and dead at the same time. Not to worry of course: Because Schrödinger’s Cat was simply a thought […]
Getting Your Story off the Ground
Sometimes the hardest thing for a writer (if my own experience is any indication!) is figuring out exactly where the story should organically begin. Only once in my life did I ever submit to taking a formal course of study with the idea of actually learning how to write, when, back in college, I signed […]
My “New Season’s” Resolution
I have never been much for making New Year’s resolutions. For one thing, hunkering down in our 170-year-old farmhouse next to the wood stove and feeding it cord after cord of firewood seems more a time for self-preservation than for ennobling self-improvement. Nor is January 1st so radically different from December 31st that it should […]
When is Writing a Story Like Stacking Firewood?
After decades of heating our home by stoking a soapstone woodstove with cord upon cord of firewood from late September to as late in the season as Memorial Day, I think I can say that I have become an expert in the art of stacking firewood. Don’t get me wrong: we do have a modern […]
My NCAA Tournament Resentment
I want to confess that I harbor a resentment against the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Not against the tournament itself, though the NCAA is partly to blame for my loss of reverence for what has become such a mainstream, commercially saturated spectacle that the games in my opinion are unwatchable, every available nanosecond crammed with an […]
What I Am Going to Do the Day After the Election, or: My Early New Year’s Resolution
I’m making my New Year’s resolution early this year. I’ve slated it for November 9th, less than one week from today. One might be tempted to wonder what that upcoming Wednesday morning—more notably the morning after perhaps the most divisive presidential election in modern American history—will feel like. Will the atmosphere and mood of the […]
Respect The Work You Do: A Lesson from Tony Schwartz and “The Art of the Deal”
In recent weeks a great deal of buzz has been made over “ghostwriter” Tony Schwartz’ tell-all New Yorker article revealing some rather illuminating aspects of his collaboration with Donald Trump in co-authoring the Republican candidate’s bestselling book, The Art on the Deal. Most of that attention has naturally centered on the political aspects, in reaction […]
Are Your Carefully Chosen Words Worth a “Heap of Beans?”
As a writer, I often struggle to utilize the most pin-pointedly, absolutely precise words to describe the idea or the image I am trying to convey, or the scene I am trying to create as vividly as humanly possible for readers who cannot be inside my head. (I assume a lot of writers do this.) […]
Thoughts on the Idea that a Good Story Can Tell Itself
An author whose work I developmentally edited some years ago wrote a very short preface—a mere 70 words—in which he stated that his book was guided by an old adage: “To convince people,” he wrote, “tell them a story or give them the facts.” He added that his book attempted to do both, and he […]
