I was ready to go home at the end of my work day when I got a call about a possible mutiny at sea. November 1990. We were in the middle of perhaps the last great American newspaper war, between my morning Anchorage Daily News and the evening Anchorage Times. Well-funded owners were throwing everything …
Developing control as a writer through disciplined attention to length
Winning permission to enter whaling camp and the promise of honesty
Memoirs sometimes show you things the author didn’t intend. A painfully egotistical book is an obvious example. But in the case of a great talent, that unintended insight can be the very thing—insight that transcends the life. Bob Dylan’s flawed and wonderful book Chronicles, Vol 1, (2004) has that quality. It shows he made great …
Dave Rose had his wry smile even as he told me why we needed to finish up his book faster than we had planned. He was going to Texas for a heart operation, and he didn’t expect to survive. We were sitting across a desk in an office, the setting of many other meetings when …
English prose styles change through time like musical or artistic styles, but within the period of a dominant style people often don’t see it as changeable—they think the current style is simply correct. I believe a period’s favored writing style can reveal something about how people thought. And that’s true for today’s ‘correct’ prose, too. …
If you can’t tell the difference between a novel written by a human being and one written by AI, why do you care? We need a good answer to that question, because we’ll soon be dealing with AIs that are all but human. Unless we’re prepared to surrender to them in many dimensions of life, …
A close friend or partner (in my case, Sarah is both) can be like an editor for your life, helping you avoid mistakes that you would regret. That happened a few weeks ago, when I wrote a newsletter while still drugged up and loopy from an operation on my back. Sarah didn’t have to read …
Generations pass on funny stories and family myths without really trying. That’s not what I’m talking about. The truth is perishable. You lose it if you don’t take time to seriously record the memories of your elders. Heirlooms become junk without their history and the people in old family photos become anonymous strangers without names …
To get people’s attention, you must give them something at least as valuable in return. Writing online makes that exchange explicit—brutally so, when a piece flops and the writer is forced to realize it just isn’t worth readers’ time. Publishing this newsletter for the last two years—this is the anniversary edition—I’ve learned more about this …
