I keep returning to Annie Dillard, poetic, astringent, profound, gnomic. I just read this great essay by writer Alexander Chee at The Mourning News on what it was like to study with Dillard as her student at Wesleyan University. It appears in the new book Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers On the People Who Changed Their Lives edited by Elizabeth Benedict. An excerpt from Chee’s remembrance: “ ‘Narrative writing sets down details in an order that evokes the writer’s …
Lessons from writing about dreams, loss, fatherhood & farming. On a fall day four years ago I sat down to write about my family’s experiences in Appalachian Ohio, where we lived and worked and were part-time farmers for thirteen years. It took me a year and a half to produce a manuscript of 500 pages. It took me another year and a half to cut 200 pages. And I’ve spent the last year restructuring (again). During this process I’ve learned a lot …
Change.org, a social-action network, sponsors an annual blog day on October 15, and today all participants are writing on global warming. A friend challenged me to participate with an angle related to writing. So, Jean, here it is! A winning narrative has emerged on global warming: the phenomenon is real and human-caused and may be ameliorated. But controversy hasn’t been laid to rest, for the issue is a surrogate for heated human differences. Some conservatives seem to feel that liberals …
We humans are the beast who records and shares the present, remembers the past, and predicts the future in narrative. We are storytellers, using the narrative’s beginning, middle, and end to order the river flood of confusion and contradiction in which we struggle to survive. Narrative is embedded in all effective writing.—Donald M. Murray, The Craft of Revision Why is narrative so necessary to storytelling and to our species? “Narrative is that distinctive form of human thinking by which we …
from an interview with the late writer Norman Mailer by J. Michael Lennon for Creating Nonfiction: A Guide and Anthology by Becky Bradway and Doug Hesse: “The form, the medium, determines the message. And the message you receive from a novel is different from the message—usually less interesting—that comes to you from nonfiction. Therefore, I like my nonfiction to read like a novel. By which I don’t mean that I fudge the facts. On the contrary, since I’m already out …
I read my first criticism of PowerPoint before I’d consciously seen many presentations. It probably flowed from Edward Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, whose essays “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” and “PowerPoint is Evil” damn it as cognitive novacaine. Citing Tufte, the board that investigated the space shuttle Columbia disaster implicated the software, used during the crisis, for what was allegedly a flawed response to the ship’s danger. (See “PowerPoint, Killer App” by Ruth Marcus in …
William Zinsser addresses the issue of fidelity to chronology in his On Writing Well, and I was surprised by his answer. Perusing the thirtieth anniversary edition of this sober classic on nonfiction, I expected Zinsser to be very conservative in all matters regarding literal truth, but after a long career of successful freelance magazine and book writing he’s practical about quotes and timelines. He approves of legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell’s composite quotes and blended timelines in his profiles. …