Maria Popova writes that keeping a personal journal "is a practice that teaches us better than any other the elusive art of solitude — how to be present with our own selves, bear witness to our experience, and fully inhabit our inner lives." She adds quotes from Thoreau, Emerson, Susan Sontag, and others, including this from Virginia Woolf: "The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles."
Writers and writing
NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and we're in it right now — or at least Barry Shell, a Vancouver freelance writer, is in it. Shell writes about what it's like to switch to fiction from writing about university research: "They say that by week three most NaNoWriMo participants get stuck, and the best advice at that point: kill off one of your characters. So I know that day will come." Also, why writers should join NaNoWriMo.
David Finkel has won a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur "genius grant" for his reporting on soldiers at war and at home, and on the attempted democratization of Yemen. He spoke to Nieman Storyboard about his methods: "If I’m having problems writing, it’s probably I haven’t organized well enough. If I’m having problems organizing, it’s probably because I haven’t reported thoroughly enough. You take a step back to the previous thing and it’ll solve the thing you’re in."
Cryptomnesia has been defined as “the belief that a thought is novel when in fact it is a memory,” Maria Popova writes, and it's something that can trip up even the best writers as a result: "Helen Keller experienced the repercussions of this phenomenon when she was accused of plagiarism, Henry Miller questioned it when he wrote 'And your way, is it really your way?' and Coleridge often tripped over the fine line between unconscious borrowing and deliberate theft."
James Baldwin on his relationship with his father. Joan Didion on California in the 1960s. John McPhee on Atlantic City — on the Monopoly board and in real life. Those essays and seven others made Robert Atwan's list of the 10 best postwar essays: "The best essays are deeply personal … and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demonstrate a mind in process — reflecting, trying-out, essaying."
The journalism professor and NASW member discusses his reporting and writing for the Pulitzer-winning nonfiction book and shares his thoughts on how he was able to meld historical research with present-day narrative: "Finding connections is what good nonfiction storytelling is all about. I kept seeing connections between Basel (Switzerland) and Toms River. Or between molecular epidemiology and classical epidemiology."
The New Republic recently reposted to its web site an essay by George Orwell on bad writing, first published in 1946. But as Jack Limpert discovered, both versions were chopped by 40%: "So, we might ask those New Republic editors of 1946, did the magazine’s publisher say, as publishers are known to do, 'The stories are too damn long' and the editors then simply ended the Orwell essay at 3,000 words, chopping off the last 2,000 words and some of the best parts?"
From Maria Popova, excerpts of a series of interviews by Malka Marom in which the singer/songwriter talks about keeping her creative vision on track through her long career: "The critics dismissed a lot of what I thought was my growth and praised a lot of what I thought common about my work. I disagreed with most of them. So I had to rely a lot on my own opinions, not to say that I wasn’t constantly asking them for advice and mulling it around, not dismissing it."
Mike Feinsilber wonders why more writers don't use a chronological structure, and he thinks he's found the reason: "Blame the inverted pyramid, the curse of journalism. It’s the chief cause for making news stories complicated, uninviting, and dull. The doctrine of the inverted pyramid holds that a news story should look like a pyramid turned upside down, with the most important element at the top and the less important elements following in descending order of importance."
It's the 40th anniversary of Robert Caro's landmark biography of Robert Moses, and Scott Porch explains how Caro dealt with the challenge of his uncooperative subject: "He drew a series of concentric circles on a page with a single dot — Robert Moses — in the center. The first circle was Moses’ family and friends, the next circle was people in regular contact, and so on, to an outer circle of people who knew Moses, and dealt with him, and were willing to discuss it."