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i think that writing and magic are pretty much synonymous what I am trying to say is that there are certain things which are given as advice to magicians which I would also think would be useful advice for somebody who is aspiring to be a writer these are the four suits of the tarot deck starting from the lowest um…
The real problem with telling young writers to fan out across genres and forms is that it doesn’t help them find a voice. If anything, it’s antivoice. Learning the craft of writing isn’t about hopping texts like hyperlinks. It’s about devotion and obsession. It’s about lingering too long in some beloved book’s…
...we overvalue new writing, almost absurdly so, and we undervalue older writing. I feel this market failure keenly each day when I recommend a fine piece of writing that deserves to be read for years to come and yet will have at most two days in the sun. You never hear anybody say, “I’m not going to listen to that…
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb…
The Age of the Essay September 2004 Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure. Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay…
We do not, we writers, represent mankind adequately. We do not think well of ourselves. We do not think amply about what we are. Essay after essay, book after book, maintain the usual thing about mass society, dehumanization, and the rest. How weary we are of them. How poorly they represent us. The pictures they offer…
Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and…
It is clear that if the phonic substance lost its privilege, it was not to the advantage of the graphic substance, which lends itself to the same substitutions. To the extent that it liberates and is irrefutable, glossematics still operates with a popular concept of writing. However original and irreducible it might…
1. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURE There can be no human (or alien) civilization or settlement without plumbing, energy supply, or waste disposal. So you need to spend at least a little bit figuring out how all of this worksunderneath your story’s setting. How do your characters eat? How do they transport and store food? How is…
What I really, truly miss is the physical trail that typing usually gives you. Typing on an actual typewriter on paper is only a softer version of chiseling words into stone.
Yet even if some technological fix were to be devised to solve the problem of character entry, the non-alphabetic nature of the writing system still results in other serious and long-standing “invisible” problems. For example, the inclusion of a standard index to books, manuals and reference materials is made orders…
With e-books becoming more dominant and less money coming into the industry, the bookstores die (they're already highly marginal now). With bookstores' death, so go the publishers (after all, any established author will make more money from self-publishing and now the *one* (incredibly important) thing the publishers…
When you write something down, either while taking notes or while trying to write your own original thoughts, you’re dealing with what literacy scholars call “transcription fluency”: How quickly and fluidly you can get down — “transcribe” — the stuff that’s in your head. One of the reasons we formally teach…
Scientific instruction is a craft. This is because skill in a science, knowledge of its diverse aspects, and mastery of it are the result of a habit.... The easiest method of acquiring the scientific habit is through acquiring the ability to express oneself clearly in discussing and disputing scientific problems. This…
Hu was well known as the primary advocate for the literary revolution of the era, a movement which aimed to replace scholarly classical Chinese in writing with the vernacular spoken language, and to cultivate and stimulate new forms of literature. In an article originally published in New Youth in January 1917 titled…
On the black hemisphere, Cassini Regio, the bulge bisects an area where people once upon a time went out in hoppers or rovers and blew the black dust away to make patterns out of exposed white ice. Anytime you can easily make such a contrast in the landscape, people have written out their thoughts for the universe to…
And for all their power and speed, today’s digital machines have shown little creative ability. They can’t compose very good songs, write great novels, or generate good ideas for new businesses. Apparent exceptions here only prove the rule. A prankster used an online generator of abstracts for computer science papers…
I'm gradually managing to cram my mind more and more full of things. I've got this beautiful mind and it's going to die, and it'll all be gone. And then I say, not in my case. Every idea I've ever had I've written down, and it's all there on paper. And I won't be gone; it'll be there.
Study nature to find your voice. One reason the natural history genre thrives today is the tremendous variety of voices it makes possible: the wild exactness of Annie Dillard, the calm thankfulness of Terry Tempest Williams, the scientific precision of Bernd Heinrich. But again, this is not just the province of…
This book is crammed with original ideas—very few of them my own. Science writers become accustomed to the feeling that they are intellectual plagiarists, raiding the minds of those who are too busy to tell the world about their discoveries. There are scores of people who could have written each chapter of my book…