Read Charles’s tips and reflections in the Writing Ideas newsletter. Sign up here:
Who is the invisible person next to you?
There are tricks to explaining complex ideas in prose, but the most important skill is holistic: adopting a mindset for evaluating the cognitive load of your sentences and the mental ...
More than half of adult Americans cannot read this
America’s Founders recognized a problem for representative democracy: average voters might not understand the skills needed for administration and leadership. A person good at winning popular votes might not be ...
The editor who forced me to spell correctly
Marc Salgado was tough. As a soccer referee, he once threw a red card, ejecting a player from a game, when the player used vulgar language about him—in the parking ...
Creation and the erotic spirit
The extraordinary poet Stanley Kunitz wrote that the essence of creativity is the erotic spirit, a point he made at age 100. The life force powered by lust—or sorrow at ...
Hungry polar bears and a 50-year story
Polar bears came into George Divoky’s camp on a barren Arctic Island last summer and devoured a colony of black guillemots he had studied there for 50 years. He didn’t ...
Here are writers I have worked with, and why
All the cliched images of writers have something in common—the tough guy with a manual typewriter and a glass of whiskey, the willowy girl perched at a window with a ...
How a brilliant writer can break the rules and get away with it
I saved Werner Herzog’s memoir for a year, until I would have time on vacation to thoroughly enjoy the madness, humor, weird asides, extraordinary feats, the complete, willful lack of ...
The political gamble behind Lisa Murkowski’s book
Now we find out if the gamble paid off. When I began working with Senator Lisa Murkowski on her new book, Far From Home, I told her I would be ...
Charles Wohlforth has written many of his own books, has ghost-written others, and helps many writers find their own way into print. Learn how to work with Charles.
Topics
Alaska
Books
Coaching
Ethics
History
Journalism
Non-fiction Practice
People
Publicity and Sales
Publishing
Style
Writing Theory