My favorite conversation: What books influenced you? These are the books that influenced my life as a writer.
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Whenever I see Fitzgerald in the bookstore, I can’t but recall fondly how his books taught me to write.
If that sounds bad the best I can offer is that it is not. Those swells remind me that whatever part of me is broken, there is another part that isn’t.
I’d go home, open a bottle of Jameson, turn off the lights in my room, pull out the napkins, crank up Merkinball, and write until the story was done.
Writing requires discipline. Sit down every day, and write the words on the page. Until the end of April, I’m starting a challenge: Write 500 words a day. I hope you’ll join me.
Tonight, an object lesson for students in the age of social media. (Actually, I’m surprised this story has remained ‘off blog’ for so long since my friends are ever-so-happy to hear it told.) In 1999, I worked as a teaching assistant for Michael Lewis while a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate […]
Professors see multi-tasking as a function of students using technology, but the call to ban technology in classrooms fails to understand the root of the problem: a lack of reading and comprehension skills.
As the nation tried to collect itself in the hours, minutes, and days after the terrorist attacks, our president rightfully spent a great deal of time and energy reassuring the public. What I didn’t believe, though, was the insistence that we could adequately monitor digital communications in order to find out if there were looming threats.
Act 1 Just shy of 20 years ago, I went to Chicago to write a story about Marc Smith, the godfather of the poetry slam (and friend of the late Jim Carroll and Patti Smith). I was writing a series of stories about literature and literary events for Cincinnati CityBeat, and I’d found out about […]
After months and years of research, I’ve finally started outlining So Far Appalachia, my next book project. The early part of the writing process involves organizing my anecdotes, inserting them within chapters, and arranging the chapters in a way that will elicit the reader to consider certain themes. It looks like this:
Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It by David M. Ewalt My rating: 3 of 5 stars It’s wildly difficult to write a first-person account of a phenomenon. The reason: Authors-as-characters only work when they become surrogates for the reader. Too often writers inject themselves into […]