Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, shares occasional “reports from the trenches” on his weekly writing blog, describing the state of his current writing project. So I thought I’d try something similar. It may look like I’m cranking out books seamlessly, but most of you see only the finished work, not the process […]
Books for Writers: The Shallows
If you want to read something that gives you chills, check out The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. No, this isn’t the script for the move about a surfer and sharks. It’s a book about the Internet and our brains – a different kind of thriller. I not sure how I missed reading the book when it […]
Ghosts and Other Invisible Writers
“I read invisible writers…” Their words are all around us. I detect them in press releases, blog posts and web pages, even in articles attributed to specific executives. Some of these words are written by ghosts — well, ghostwriters. They intentionally choose to disappear behind another purported author. Invisibility is part of their job or […]
The Five Phases of Book Research
My favorite part is of the writing process isn’t crafting the perfect sentence, making a brilliant point, or polishing words. No, it’s research. That’s a good thing, because as a nonfiction author, I spend a great deal of time actively researching, even when not at work on another book. Sometimes that work doesn’t look like […]
Subscription Guilt Trips
I was having a comment conversation with Robbie Kellman Baxter the other day and… Wait – you don’t know what a comment conversation is? It’s what writers do when they start exchanging ideas and stories in the comments of a blog post, because they’re too lazy to pick up the phone and call, and are […]
Metaphors in Nonfiction: Unexpected Truths
What does the gin represent in T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party? How about the water? Questions like these torment students of literature. As an English major in college, I dedicated many brain cycles to analyzing figurative language in fiction: similes, metaphors, imagery, etc. Little did I know that the study of figurative language would […]