From Michael Pollan’s comments in Nieman Narrative Digest: “Journalists often write as people who have mastered subjects and are telling you about them. That’s a real turn-off for readers. In my work I often begin as a naif. It’s a good place to start because it’s a lot closer to where your reader is. Instead of starting as someone who knows the answers, you begin as someone learning about something. That’s a good way to connect with readers. “I often …
from Klosterman’s interview with Michael Piafsky in The Missouri Review, Fall 2008 “In essay writing you can’t explain things enough. The better you explain something, the more detailed the argument is structured, the better it is. But in a novel, you are better off underexplaining things. You can have two characters having a conversation, and it doesn’t matter if the tangible interaction is technically unclear; you can still get a sense or a feeling from it, and you can somehow …
from the “Letters to a Young Writer” series in Narrative Magazine “I am socially engaged, unlike many of my contemporaries, and I take on a whole variety of issues, yes, but increasingly I have found myself coming back to the central one of the environment, and, by extension, the meaning of our lives in the face of an indifferent universe. How and why do we master the other species? How long will our tenure be? Why have we evolved the …
from Letters to a Young Journalist by Samuel J. Freedman “You need to know that these techniques—identifying a single theme, outlining before writing—are not baby steps for beginners. The most accomplished nonfiction writers utilize them.” “Robert Caro has won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, among other honors, for his epic biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, each volume hundreds of thousands of words in length. Still, Caro once told a class of mine that he will not …
from “Immediate Stages of the Erotic” in Either/Or, Volume I “That which you have loved with youthful enthusiasm and admired with youthful ardor, that which you have secretly and mysteriously preserved in the innermost recesses of your soul, that which you have hidden in the heart: that you always approach with a certain shyness, with mingled emotions, when you know that the purpose is to try to understand it.” “As far as Mozart’s music is concerned, my soul knows no …
From “What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow,” a chapter in Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft of Fiction Writing— “According to [Virginia] Tufte [in Grammar as Style], ‘The better the writer . . . the more he tends to vary his sentence length. And he does it as dramatically as possible.’ Since variation of sentence length results from varying sentence structure, ultimately it’s our syntax that determines whether our prose flows …