Reading time: About 1 minute Do you need to become better at accepting feedback? This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find materials to help other writers… Some writers have a hard time accepting feedback for their work. And when I hear about the sort of […]
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Viewing time: 3 min. 58 sec. The Write Question is a weekly video podcast about writing that I started in 2017 and that ran, more or less weekly, until April 2022. This is a republication of issue #49, about sticky writing. The post first ran on March 9/18. Transcript: Welcome to The Write Question, I’m
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of similes and metaphors from novelist Tom Rachman…. I found the 2010 book, The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman, to be a magnificent coup — a first novel that engaged,
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: mesallinace…. Craig Brown’s book, Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, is enormous fun, even for people who aren’t fans of the royals. A kind of a meditation on the
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Reading time: About 3 minutes Do you know how to let your mind wander? Don’t worry if people call you a “daydreamer.” A wandering mind is your passport to greater creativity. A majestic cypress tree grew outside my grade 11 classroom window, eons ago. I remember spending hours staring at it, exploring its velvety green
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I discuss a blog post about cleaning your writing office… Is your office (or your desk) relatively tidy? Or does it look like mine
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Viewing time: 3 min. 48 sec. The Write Question is a weekly video podcast about writing that I started in 2017 and that ran, more or less weekly, until April 2022. This is a republication of issue #48, about writerly guilty and how it can derail you. The post first ran on March 2/18. Transcript:
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Reading time: About 1 minute I like to share similes and metaphors I encounter in my reading. I write today about the figurative language of Julian Barnes…. I read Julian Barnes’ latest novel, The Only Story, earlier this year. While I enjoyed the beginning, I can’t say the book was up to his usual high standards.
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: uxorious…. When I encountered the word uxorious in Patricia Hampl’s very fine non-fiction book The Art of the Wasted Day, I had no idea what it meant.
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Reading time: About 4 minutes Do you think you need to be happy or inspired to write? You have it exactly backwards! Instead, mood follows action…. Have you ever tried to write and found yourself unable to do it? My hunch is that you were waiting to feel more inspired. Or, at the very least,
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