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Each year, I keep a running list of exceptional nonfiction that I encounter as I publish The Best of Journalism, an email newsletter that I curate weekly for its subscribers. This is my annual attempt to bring roughly 100 of those stories that stood the test of time to a wider audience. I could not read or note every worthy article published in the past few years, and I haven't included any paywalled articles or anything published at The Atlantic. But everything that follows is worthy of wider attention and engagement. I hope it provides fodder for reflection and inspiration for future writing. My thanks to all of the publishers, editors and, writers who made these gems possible.
It is almost upon us! Yes, your favorite annual torture device writing festival is nearly upon us, where thousands of intrepid novelists will set aside November cheer in favor of tearing up their laptops in an effort to write a novel in just one month. It's called NaNoWriMo, and it's quite something. Are you ready? You sure? Here are some links that may help. First off, all of my best tips are written up all nice and polished-like in my guide to writing a novel, otherwise known as How to Write a Novel: 47 Rules for Writing a Stupendously Awesome Novel You Will Love Forever. (That link is to Amazon but it's available in All The Usual Places online.) If you prefer your advice in the free form (as in, it doesn't cost anything), here are some links to get you started:...
One of the reasons writing a great novel is so challenging is that there is no obvious starting place. Is it a character? A premise? A theme? A single sentence that won’t get out of your head?
While that argument continues to rage, what remains in less dispute is this: there are a set of principles and essential elements that, before the story works, you need to get right. With that in mind, this series introduces – reintroduces, actually, since these are the foundation of this body of work, and my three writing books – ten of those essential elements.
Today’s post defines and explores the one that is in the running for that Square One focus….
Metaphor is not the sole preserve of Shakespearean scholarship or high literary endeavour but has governed how we think about and describe our daily lives for centuries, according to researchers at Glasgow University.
Experts have now created the world’s first online Metaphor Map, which contains more than 14,000 metaphorical connections sourced from 4m pieces of lexical data, some of which date back to 700AD.
While it is impossible to pinpoint the oldest use of metaphor in English, because some may have been adopted from earlier languages such as Germanic, the map reveals that the still popular link between sheep and timidity dates back to Old English. Likewise, we do not always recognise modern use of metaphor: for example, the word “comprehend” comes from Latin, where it meant to physically grasp an object.
The three-year-long project to map the use of metaphor across the entire history of the English language, undertaken by researchers at the School of Critical Studies, was based on data contained in the Historical Thesaurus of English, which spans 13 centuries....
Your headline is the first contact with your content, and must grab your target audiences’ attention. At this point you have no control – the reader does. They either click the link to your content or they don’t. The job of the content creator is to make sure that they choose the first option, and read and share your carefully crafted content.
How much time do you spend coming up with a killer title? Reading stats like this one by Copyblogger should make you sit up and take notice.“
On average 8 out of 10 people will read your headline but only 2 out of ten will read the rest of your content.”....
When you can send a prospect a well-crafted article that addresses his exact question, you've got a powerful tool. You'll get extra points if it's published in a major news source in your industry or has high engagement via social media.
So what is the best way to actually get pen to paper (or fingers to keys) and start laying out some prose? Given my seventh-grade love for alliteration, here are the five steps I use when trying to bring out my inner Hemingway: Environment, Exploration, Extraction, Expansion, and Editing....
Since finding a way into your readers’ hearts and minds is your goal, you can exhaust your brain trying to find that perfect connection. As a result, instead of producing the perfect piece of content, you accomplish very little or nothing at all.Several years ago, I discovered a writing trick that helps me overcome these types of perfectionism problems.It’s called free writing....
I guess I’m in a metaphysical mood today. Thinking about writing for the internet, how it’s different, and finding your own style.
So, let’s set the scene…
Seth Godin, Lao-Tzu and I walk into Hemingway’s Bar & Grill. Godin says, “I’ll have a Purple Cow.” I say, in my best Homer Simpson salutation, “Beer me.” Lao-Tzu says, “Ommmmm.”
Drinks with Seth Godin
That’s me channeling Seth Godin, echoing Lao-Tzu.
Except I’m not a bald guy and I don’t wear saffron like either of these wise men....
The editors of American Scholar have chosen “Ten Best Sentences” from literature, and readers have suggested many more. They threw in an eleventh for good measure. This lovely feature caught me in the middle of a new book project, “Art of X-ray Reading,” in which I take classic passages such as these and look beneath the surface of the text. If I can see the machinery working down there, I can reveal it to writers, who can then add to their toolboxes.
With respect and gratitude to American Scholar, I offer brief interpretations below on how and why these sentences work:...
Quotes from Sylvia Plath, George Orwell, Zadie Smith, Roald Dahl, Junot Diaz, Harper Lee and others on 'Why I Write'. “I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.” – Sylvia Plath
...Below, we’ve excerpted twenty good reads he recommends for budding writers. These are books, King writes, that directly inspired him: “In some way or other, I suspect each book in the list had an influence on the books I wrote.”
To the writer, he says, “a good many of these might show you some new ways of doing your work.” And for the reader? “They’re apt to entertain you. They certainly entertained me.”..
Thriller writer Alex Marwood shares some of the techniques that have helped her become a best seller.“Writing is a profession, not a hobby. To succeed, you have to prioritise your work over other things. That’s really difficult before you’ve been published – but writing, and writing well, takes so much time and frustration, you have to have the guts to stick it out.”...
There are two kinds of people: Those who think they can write, and those who think they can’t. And, very often, both are wrong. The truth is, most of us fall somewhere in the middle. We are all capable of producing good writing....
Words matter. Your words (what you say) and style (how you say it) are your most cherished (and undervalued) assets.
Yet, so often, they are overlooked. Think of this way: If a visitor came to your website without its branding in place (logo, tagline, and so on), would he or she recognize it as yours? Are you telling your story there from your unique perspective, with a voice and style that’s clearly all you?
Here, in no particular order, is what I’ve learned about the necessary qualities of good writing (or content, in our digital vernacular), based on my own 25 years’ working as a writer and editor… and even longer career as a reader....
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Donald Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true, often shamelessly so, and it’s tempting to call him a liar. But that’s not quite right. As the Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt put it in a famous essay, to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth — and the goal is to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump, more often than not, isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care. In Trump's own book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, our now-president describes himself in a way that Frankfurt could hold up as the quintessential example of a bullshitter. Trump writes that he’s an "I say what’s on my mind" kind of guy. Pages later, he explains that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily an honest guy." If you do things a little differently," he writes of the media, "if you say outrageous things and fight back, they love you." The free publicity that results from deliberately provoking controversy is invaluable. And if a bit of exaggeration is what it takes, Trump doesn’t have a problem with that. "When," he asks "was the last time you saw a sign hanging outside a pizzeria claiming ‘The fourth best pizza in the world’?!"...
The Challenge is Simple. Day One: 3,000 words. And then each day after that add 1,000 words to the amount needed. Seven days, if my math is right, I will have a 42,000 word novel. 3,000… 4,000… 5,000… 6,000… 7,000… 8,000… 9,000 words. 7 Days. Day Seven (9,000 word day) Got the book done!!!! The goal today was at 9,000 words and needed to be the focus of my day because I had no idea how many words I would actually need to end this book. I had 3,000 words in the bank, so that helped the worry some....
1) Stephen KingIf you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.
2) Suzanne CollinsAll the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story… You’ve got good characters… People think there’s some dramatic difference between writing ‘Little Bear’ and the ‘Hunger Games,’ and as a writer, for me, there isn’t.
3) George OrwellFor a creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity....
The key to an emotionally engaging headline? Context Words: a group of 1,072 words in the English language that can increase a person’s interest and attention in a specific message.
Context Words were uncovered through EEG testing and something called the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient, a way to measure the correlation between two variables. In this case, we were looking to understand the relationship between word choice and the brain’s emotional response.
We’ve split the Context Words into four categories: insight words, time words, space words and motion words.Insight words provide more detail, i.e. closure, admit, inform, think. Time words refer to a point in time, i.e. after, fast, long, prior. Motion and space words help us understand where something is happening, i.e. appear, replace, arrive, enter....
Find out if there is poetry in your tweets.
Some claim that the best way to learn a craft is by imitating -- studying and copying the authorities of your industry with the intention of adopting their techniques. But too often, we rely only on the current lanscape of creative to inspire us. You need a dose of history -- in a modern format, of course!
We created a "social profile" for 10 icons of the advertising industry to guide you in discovering more about his or her creative work, famous words, and life.
Be inspired and challenged by these masters of creativity.
Hour after hour, this terrible fever. What the hell am I doing? I kept asking myself. Why am I forcing a fine new machine to pretend it is a half-dozen old, useless machines?
Eventually I realized: This might be about my friend Tom dying. At least I think so. I am not good at identifying my own motives. It usually takes me at least ten days and a number of snacks to go from feeling something to being able to articulate what I felt. Indeed, I got the news ten days ago, in an email from my friend Jim....
Because sleeping with the lights off is completely overrated, take a peek at these ten scary two-sentence horror stories!
On this day ...in 1948, Lowell native Jack Kerouac happily noted in his diary that he had written 2500 words. If he could keep up this pace, he would finish his first novel in a matter of weeks. The highly autobiographical The Town and the City was published in 1950, the same year he began writing On the Road, the novel that earned him the title "Father of the Beat Generation." By the time he died at the age of 47 Jack Kerouac had published 14 books. On the Road is Kerouac's most-read work today; it is widely considered one of the most important and influential American novels of the twentieth century, and Jack Kerouac is celebrated as one of Lowell's favorite sons....
When we asked you to nominate your favorite writing blog as one of the top 10 blogs for writers, we got over 1,100 nominations! Wonderful to see how passionate readers are about their favorite writing blog.
It’s great to see some very interesting new blogs amongst the winners! Of note is that quite a few blogs in the top 10 are associated with author platforms. Make sure you visit all the top 10 blogs to get to know the new crop of top writing blogs....
What's that? Your job leaves you with scarcely enough time or energy to cook occasional healthy meals, let alone lose yourself in a great book? We're sure you're busy, but we're incredulous, especially considering your fervent opinions on "The Mindy Project."
We needn't remind you of the multitudinous benefits of reading - some of them obvious, some of them surprising - but we will anyway: Books can make you more empathetic. They can keep your brain sharp, and even stave off Alzheimer's disease.
Still not ready to hop on the Infinite Jest bandwagon? Fair enough. But we urge you to start somewhere. According to Forbes, the average reading speed for an American adult is 300 words per minute. So we did a little math, and found 12 short stories that, for the average American adult, should take less than 10 minutes each to read. Check a few out on your lunch break! Who knows, you may discover something you like...
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This list honors the craft of journalism - fantastic nonfiction from 2016 is still worth discovering and pondering today. Highly recommended! 10/10