Writers and writing

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From Maria Popova comes a collection of quotes from famous authors on writing. Can you match the writers (Hemingway, Susan Orlean, Stephen King, Isabel Allende) to their words? "You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it." "I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops." "All bad writers are in love with the epic." "Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too."

Can science writers learn from folklore? Michele Arduengo says yes: "The fairy tale 'The Twelve Brothers' provides a great study in time management, slowing down time when the details are critical, such as the day the daughter discovers the truth about her brothers and sets off after them, and speeding up time to move the plot forward when the details are unimportant: 'They spent ten years in the little cottage, where they were safe, and the time passed quickly.'"

Behind the many books of Tracy Kidder lies an editor named Richard Todd. Now they've written a book, Good Prose, which Carl Sessions Stepp reviews in AJR: "Like many fine editors, Todd seems to have trouble pinpointing what he does that is special. What stands out, instead, is a more holistic picture of editing, where shimmery concepts like trust and respect matter as much as technique and wordsmithing." Buy the book from the NASW Bookstore.

Finding the right way to start is part of the formula, Jo Marchant writes as part of the Guardian's "Secrets of Good Science Writing" series: "I look for something concrete and specific — a small detail, but one that plunges the reader into the heart of a story and gives them no choice but to read on. Science stories are full of complex, abstract ideas, but if you start with those, readers might not make it past the first paragraph."

Tim Radford in the Guardian offers some advice to science writers: "Beware of long and preposterous words. Beware of jargon. If you are a science writer this is doubly important. If you are a science writer, you occasionally have to bandy words that no ordinary human ever uses, like phenotype, mitochondrion, cosmic inflation, Gaussian distribution and isostasy. So you really don't want to be effulgent or felicitous as well. You could just try being bright and happy."

If so, you weren't the only one. That brief guide to Good English won the most mentions when Mike Feinsilber asked 21 journalists to name the books "that drew them into the business." The rest of the list is heavy on the usual suspects — journo-whodunits like All The President's Men, political narratives like The Making of the President 1960 and The Boys on the Bus, and a few wild cards, like Tom Wolfe's collection The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

That's the view of children’s science magazine editor Elizabeth Preston writing on SciLogs. Children give your writing "an almost scary amount of attention," she says. "They read the masthead, the photo credits and the advertisement on the back cover. If there’s a typo somewhere, they will notice it. And then they will write letters about it. (There are few things more demoralizing as an editor, I can report, than having an 11-year-old point out your homonym error.)"

Have you heard the 80/20 rule? Stephannie Beman puts it this way: "It’s basically 80% of your time should be on Marketing and 20% writing and other business related work." But she says the rule has it exactly backwards. You should spend 80% of your time writing and only 20% on everything else. Otherwise, you may not have anything much to market. Beman and others then offer some tips for keeping the beast — blogging, emailing, etc. — from taking over your workday.

Joanna Penn outlines her nine-step process for turning an ugly first draft into a finished product, ready for publication, and beyond. Step five is dealing with your line editor's critique: "The first time you get such a line edit, it hurts. You think you’re a writer and then someone changes practically every sentence. Ouch. But editing makes your book stronger, and the reader will thank you for it." Also from Penn, editing through community.

Do you use litotes in your writing? Or synecdoche? Those are just two of the rhetorical devices Roy Peter Clark discusses in this Poynter post: "Let’s take the word zeugma, for example, a move in which a single verb in a sentence creates two different senses by its attachment to two different objects ... 'Gingrich dragged out his seven point plan and his blondest wife.' Or, 'The County Commission voted to restore fluoride to the water and sanity to the public debate.'"