This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for all the smart folks out there writing about writing. Back in a much earlier life I briefly studied photography, and one of my favorite practitioners was a guy named Duane Michals. If your idea of great photography is precision of structure, perfect lighting and gorgeous darkroom technique, a la Ansel […]
words matter
How Will it All End?
Beginnings are nerve-wracking. Middles can be tricky. But the highest circle of writing misery, in my book, resides in figuring out how to close. Ever since the days of high school essays, I’ve hated writing conclusions. In conventional essay writing, the role of the conclusion is to summarize. But if what I’m writing is a […]
What’s in a Word: Sandy Pulls Me Back to Earth
I’m writing this post from my home office in southwestern Queens, where we’ve been lucky. A couple of uprooted and scarily teetering trees on the street, spotty cell phone service and a complete breakdown of the transportation we rely on to get to school and work—but other than that, my family has survived Superstorm Sandy […]
Exercising Your Metaphor Muscle
My niece recently spent a few weeks in South Korea, sending home evocative missives about her travels. In one email, she likened a short, uncomfortable flight she took to an island to being shot out of a slingshot. She kept the metaphor alive paragraphs later, when she described the return trip: “it was sad to […]
Killing the Monsters
On the whole, I don’t believe in synonyms. Such is the magnificent complexity of the English language that only rarely do two words mean exactly the same thing. Even if the dictionary gives two words the same definition, they almost never carry the same connotation, which is what makes using the thesaurus such a treacherous […]
Eschew Jargon
Don’t you love that word: eschew? English is rich with so many quirky, wonderful words. One of the great joys of reading great literature is savoring the writer’s word choices like a dish cooked by a master chef. (Sometimes I just stop reading to wonder at the word a writer has used. How did he/she […]