Search results for “writing the book”

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"She stares at me, but it feels like she's looking at who I used to be, her little girl with ponytails and a snaggletooth who swore she was a Powerpuff Girl."

“She stares at me, but it feels like she’s looking at who I used to be, her little girl with ponytails and a snaggletooth who swore she was a Powerpuff Girl.”

This sentence contains everything that good narrative writing should. There’s the specific detail of the narrator, and there’s universality — the wonder we humans experience when faced with a child…
March 20, 2019
Wired's executive editor seeks stories that reveal all faces of technology

Wired’s executive editor seeks stories that reveal all faces of technology

Rejections aren't personal: “70 percent of why pitches don't work has nothing to do with the writer”
March 5, 2019
Raw first stories from the Appalachian Trail

Raw first stories from the Appalachian Trail

When I first discovered that Earl Shaffer — the first man acknowledged to have hiked the entire 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine — lived nearby, I went through…
February 28, 2019
Building a museum with jars of dirt, and building stories from the ground up

Building a museum with jars of dirt, and building stories from the ground up

 One day last October, Cara Solomon sat alone in an empty field in Alabama, the unmarked site of a lynching. She wasn’t carrying a reporter’s notebook or thinking yet about…
February 26, 2019
"I’m thinking longer term, in geologic time, doing just what I can each day and not putting it off because it won’t be brilliant."

“I’m thinking longer term, in geologic time, doing just what I can each day and not putting it off because it won’t be brilliant.”

When I encountered this sentence, I took it personally. I like being brilliant. I like it so much that I don’t write as much as I should. It’s uncomfortable to…
February 20, 2019
What the "Insect Apocalypse" reveals about faulty human memory

What the “Insect Apocalypse” reveals about faulty human memory

Brooke Jarvis takes windshield wipers to environmental blindness
February 19, 2019
Forget the chocolates. Tell a story instead

Forget the chocolates. Tell a story instead

I‘m not much on Valentine’s Day. I liked the grade school tradition of exchanging Valentine’s Day cards with classmates. (Is that just a U.S. thing?) Each of us was supposed…
February 14, 2019
“I work like a watchmaker or an old-fashioned silversmith: one eye screwed up... ”

“I work like a watchmaker or an old-fashioned silversmith: one eye screwed up… ”

“I work like a watchmaker or an old-fashioned silversmith: one eye screwed up, the other fitted with a watchmaker’s magnifying glass, with a fine tweezers between my fingers, with bits…
February 13, 2019
For the love of analog in a digital world

For the love of analog in a digital world

Every August when I was young, my mother would take me to the store to buy some back-to-school notebooks. Maybe some pencils. Sometimes even a plastic pencil sharpener.This was a…
February 6, 2019
A prescient voice speaks for the Earth

A prescient voice speaks for the Earth

 Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac” turns 70 this year. At a time when writing about ecological emergency is emotionally and politically fraught, the “Almanac” is a balm of wisdom…
February 5, 2019