You’ve written that gripping long-form story, and you’re champing at the bit to get a book deal. What do you do? My own journey started with a lot of wrong turns and even more learning, which I wrote about … Read more
All the great writers have proffered wisdom on the craft, the best-in-show quote being Norman Mailer’s: “Writing books is the closest men come to childbearing.” But the literary sages have offered scarce advice to serious long-form journalists on plotting, … Read more
Earlier this month, we posted a short “One Great Moment” piece on a dazzling line of dialog from the new-this-season Netflix movie “A Boy Called Christmas.” Dame Maggie Smith is telling three fidgety children a story. Read more
Bayfield, Wisconsin, is a charming little village, population 500 or so, that sits on the northernmost peninsula of the state, along the southern shore of Lake Superior. It looks out onto a ice-clear body of water called the Chequamegon … Read more
Many — maybe most — journalists aspire to write a book. Back in the day, more than a few of them had a work-in-progress hidden in the bottom drawer of their desk. Newsroom sightings put the wannabes at the … Read more
Some book purists may cringe at this, but one test of a great book, to me, is how many pages are dogeared by the time I finish. Those are the ones I tuck on a shelf, reluctant to take … Read more
It was while listening to a Tamil story on Spotify that the thought occurred to me: Listening to stories in vernacular Indian languages had changed my writing. Some of the influence came from the cadences of speech. Some came … Read more
In “The Art of Description: World into Word,” Mark Doty writes that Proust endeavored to “dilate the sentence toward its outer limit, so that one would feel the blur of space and time that the unit of syntax … Read more
Every year, or as often as I can, I go into the northern Minnesota woods, usually alone now, seeking tranquility and time to brood and reflect. And I write while I’m there, among the pines, at a campfire or … Read more
We are living in a century of displacement, says Jessica Goudeau, award-winning author of “After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America.” And because we are, journalists need to learn to … Read more