"I can’t imagine a nonfiction writer who wasn’t influenced by the fiction he or she had read. But the “thriller-like pacing” you find in my writing may come more from my own beat than from thrillers. I walk fast and am impatient. I get bored easily—no less with my own ideas than with those of others. Writing for me is a process of constantly throwing out stuff that doesn’t seem interesting enough. I grew up in a family of big interrupters."
Janet Malcolm interviewed by Katie Roiphe in The Paris Review.
posted by escabeche
on Jul 25, 2011 -
6 comments
Looking for something to read? Check out the
best journalism Conor Friedersdorf encountered in 2009. And in
2008. He also updates a
twitter feed with pieces he comes across that he either missed or that might make onto a 2010 list.
posted by AceRock
on Feb 25, 2010 -
16 comments
You have a great idea for a novel and
it's almost November, so you think now is the time to get cracking. You've decided that
hiring a ghostwriter is too easy, but you don't have
100 days to write your novel and
the snowflake method seems too frilly. Snowflakes, those delicate little monsters that papered your car when you were stranded on the road in Minnesota. A single snowflake is beautiful, but millions make an avalanche. You were cold, so cold, yet you survived. You're not sure if you have time to
read a book on what not to do (
UK edition), and
the search results are daunting. Forget all that, because you already know how to write, right? Embrace your awesome, magnificent, spellbinding abilities, go forward but never back, ever spinning, shake the rain off your bedspread, and now that you have brewed a delicious pot of steamy, hot, life-giving coffee, you can learn
how to write badly well. [via
mefi projects]
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Oct 22, 2009 -
35 comments
John McPhee writes about
basketball,
headmasters,
oranges,
tennis,
hybrid airships,
nuclear weapons,
bark canoes,
Alaska,
the Swiss Army,
the merchant marines,
dissident Soviet artists,
shad,
long-distance trucking, and - Pulitzer Prize-winningly -
geology (282kb PDF). He discusses his work
here.
[more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Sep 30, 2009 -
32 comments
Confessions of A Long Distance Sailor - I had been sitting in dark rooms, punching computer keys, for years. I had always wanted to learn SCUBA diving, hike around in the tropics, so I booked a flight to Hawaii. But a month later I was in — are you ready? — a traffic jam on Maui.
I understand now, from the moment I touched that sailboat's dock lines, I was doomed to sail.
posted by phrontist
on Jun 17, 2007 -
12 comments
Booktribes is a new site from the creators of
writing site Abctales where bibliophiles can compile lists of every book they've ever read. Replete with a simple, intuitive interface, compiling your life's reading list becomes strangely addictive, and for the whole of March, the best comment of the day on this as-yet underpopulated site wins a copy of David Mitchell's
Black Swan Green, with the best comment of the month winning the entire 21 volume Sceptre Collection. And if you're worried your reading list isn't up to scratch, don't panic -
you can always cheat.
posted by RokkitNite
on Mar 3, 2007 -
20 comments
"When I read his work, I forgive him all his sins". Edmund Wilson
disliked being called a critic. He thought of himself as a journalist, and
nearly all his work was done for commercial magazines, principally Vanity Fair, in the nineteen-twenties; The New Republic, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties; The
New Yorker, beginning in the nineteen-forties; and The New York Review of Books, in the nineteen-sixties. He was
exceptionally well read: he had had a first-class education in English, French, and Italian literature,
and he kept adding languages all his life. He learned to read German, Russian, and Hebrew; when he died, in 1972, he was working on Hungarian.
Edmund Wilson and American culture.
(more inside)
posted by matteo
on Aug 25, 2005 -
12 comments
Interviews:
Russell Banks,
Susan Orlean,
Tibor Fischer,
Azar Nafisi.
| Writing on
social justice:
Susan Power on Bosnia.
Barbara Erenreich on poverty.
| e-books:
Aristotle,
Emma Goldman,
Buddha.
| New
Non-
fiction,
fiction.
| Hundreds of
Reviews. Graphic Art, Poetry, Music, and much more from
identity theory, one of the best literary websites I've encountered, thanks to an incredulity-inducing amount of work by what seem to be volunteers. Wow.
(Specific interviews already MeFid in these threads.)
posted by louigi
on Jun 1, 2005 -
1 comment
Who Wears Short Shorts? Micro Stories and MFA Disgust Being a writer in today's lovely world of fiction and creative nonfiction is like reliving 70's TV hell, where that Nair commercial jingle has been conveniently rewritten into "Who writes short shorts?" Poetic vision rarely shows up. After all, how can you express vision in 100 words? As for plot and character development, give those antiquated goods to Goodwill. All that matters with short shorts is a competent writing style and a desire for lots of publication credits.
posted by ColdChef
on Nov 22, 2004 -
33 comments
Warning: this is possibly the worst story ever told. Ever wanted to know what it's like to have a
beef tapeworm? (Fun fact: they're the kind that fills your whole intestinal tract!) A storyteller on
The Fray helpfully clues us in to the experience of living with, and eventually destroying, his li'l parasite buddy. Don't read it if you don't want to wish for death at the end. (Blessedly, there are no photographs, though there are some toon-like illustrations.) Via
Boing Boing.
posted by logovisual
on May 7, 2004 -
40 comments
Has anyone read "Swimming Across" by Andy Grove? It appears to be pretty far from the traditional "look-at-me, revel in my vision, I'm an uber-CEO," self-promotional book; he never even gets into his Intel career, apparently. Instead it's
an account of Grove's childhood in Hitler and Stalin's Hungary and the story of how he came to America. The book has been
getting great reviews, from people as diverse as
Tom Brokaw, Elie Wiesel and Monica Seles. Still, the cynic in me says that no matter how dramatic the tale, when you're a Fotune 500 CEO, you always have other motives. Perhaps I'm just too cynical. So again, has anyone read it? What did you think?
posted by emptyage
on Nov 26, 2001 -
3 comments
