To create a body of work, you need a body that can do the work
One of the most surprising discoveries I made while writing REST was how many of my subjects-- Nobel laureates, famous novelists, artists, scientists, and others-- were athletes. I had
Morning edits
I got the page proofs for REST a few days ago, and am now working through them. It's always interesting and a little disorienting to see your words
Shirley Jackson on the magic of writing
From Shirley Jackson's essay "How I Write," publishing recently in the collection Let Me Tell You: Once, however, when I had spent all one rainy day wrestling with
Where I Write: Authors show that all writing spaces are pretty similar
This evening while trying to figure out what in the world Periscope is and whether I should use it to promote REST, I came across Where I Write
“Thank you for being late”
Almost exactly a year ago, Tom Friedman was at Davos and wrapped up his talk with this: The Arab Spring is failing not for lack of bandwidth, but
“I’m not a writer, I’m a rewriter”
I'm deep in the last phase of revising the book, and came across these two quotations about rewriting. First is David McCullough, from an interview in the Paris Review:
The last push
Today I started a leave of absence from my job, to focus on finishing my book. The manuscript is due in five weeks, and I'm determined to make
“Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life.”
From Annie Dillard's The Writing Life: How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one,
John Ashberry on routine
John Ashberry on the importance of routine for a writer, from Jill Krementz's lovely little book, The Writer's Desk: It's important to try to write when you are
John Le Carré: “I was always very careful to give my country second-best”
John Le Carré, talking in the Paris Review about working on his first book while commuting to work: In those days English newspapers were much too big to