Tag: writing
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Mundane is magic
Gracy Olmstead is back with another excellent issue of her Granola newsletter, this time on mundanity, the mind, and AI: While doing the mundane, we lose ourselves in process and place. The mundane roots us in the present, stubbornly refusing the demands of clock or calendar. It will take as much time as it requires.…
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Tyrannies and typewriters
Richard Polt typecasting about why we need typewriters in our age of AI and authoritarianism: When you choose to write with a typewriter, you are quixotically, nobly flying in the face of the assumption that good = fast, efficient, perfect, and productive. Type your gloriously imperfect, expending ineffiencient time and energy — and declare that…
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Blogging now and then
CJ Chilvers: According to research by Neil Patel, 59.2% of traffic to blogs is driven by SEO. It’s the biggest single driver of traffic by far. Neil found that if your site is 10 or more years old, 44% percentage of the pages on your site could be considered “irrelevant” by search engines. The more irrelevant…
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The seven year etch, or why am I paper resistant?
In what amounts to a positively glacial pace, I finally managed to fill up the small pocket Moleskine notebook I’ve been carrying around for seven years: It was given to me by my friend Jason, an artist who founded Geocommunetrics and gave it this unique cover design: It was tucked in my backpack for most…
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Writes and thinks
Excerpts (though you should read the whole thing) from Paul Graham’s dissection of writes and write-nots: The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it’s fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard. And yet writing pervades many jobs, and the more prestigious the job, the…
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On good and gobbledygook writing
Rivaling Winston Churchill’s missive on brevity, this 1944 memo by Maury Maverick is the first known use of the word gobbledygook and dishes out some hard truths about good writing: Be short and use Plain English. Memoranda should be as short as clearness will allow. The Naval officer who wired “Sighted Sub — Sank Same” told the…
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Barbenheimer: screenwriting edition
Well, not exactly, but Christopher Nolan’s recent appearance on the Scriptnotes podcast was excellent and inspired me to check out Greta Gerwig’s 2020 appearance for Little Women too. Both have really thoughtful things to say about the craft of writing and how it relates to moviemaking. Here’s Gerwig on the ache of absence in Little…
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A new home for ‘The Wedding Singer at NCC’
Back in early 2011 I produced a photo documentary of the student-directed stage musical production of The Wedding Singer at North Central College, where I’d graduated the year before. I set up shop on Tumblr and documented the behind-the-scenes process over the 10-week period. It was fun to watch the show come together from the…
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Cut the intro
Robin Rendle preaching the truth: Here’s one way to improve the thing you’re writing: cut the intro. Writing about the symbiosis between trees and mushrooms? Don’t start talking about how humanity has depended on trees since the blah blah blah. Just jump right in! Talking about new features in your app? Don’t start with the…
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Write thank-you notes to your favorite authors
Literally: find a favorite (not dead) author’s website and use their contact form to send them a message with specifics about why you like them. I’ve done this several times. The nice thing is they’re usually very accessible and responsive, maybe because they tend not to get the same kind of public praise as actors,…
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17 years
Today marks the 17th anniversary of my very first blog post. Thanks to everyone who has read and shared my scribbles in that time. I’m very proud of the body of work I’ve made and hope you’ll continue following along. Wanna browse the archives? Check out my film and books pages, along with the various…
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How to make time for art
I noticed three writers posted about similar things around the same time, so I thought I ought to pay attention… Oliver Burkeman: In the end, the reason actually doing things matters so much isn’t because it’s the right way to raise a successful adult, complete a novel, or achieve some other beneficial future goal. It’s…
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Journalism is just the art of capturing behavior
The opening monologue of the 2003 film Shattered Glass: Some reporters think it’s political content that makes a story memorable. I think it’s the people you find… their quirks, their flaws, what makes them funny, what makes them human. Journalism is just the art of capturing behavior. You have to know who you’re writing for.…
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A spoonful of Cinema Sugar
I’m very excited to share a new thing I’m part of that’s now live on the internet: Cinema Sugar, a website/newsletter/social media destination for people who love to see, think about, and talk about movies. Our mission statement: We are not interested in celebrity culture. We are not interested in hate-watching, takedowns, or tasteless criticism.…
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Winston Churchill’s memo on brevity
I’m reading Erik Larson’s latest book The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz and appreciated his spotlighting a memo Churchill sent out to his cabinet with the title “Brevity.” Highlights: To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them…
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Lowercase truths
Bret Stephens, in a column on the New York Times’s 1619 Project: Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not…