Good writers don’t rely on their brains alone to convey a sense of place. They use their legs by visiting the places where their characters lived. Last month, on a trip to Boston I did just that. Read more
Follow these tips. You may not become the next Tom Wolfe or Joan Didion, but you will become more competent and professional. Read more
Reporters failed to identify President Biden’s cognitive decline for many reasons. Sure, many were biased ideologically, but they failed for other reasons as well. Read more
I worked with David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon, among other smash-hit nonfiction books. When he was a staff writer, his office was around the corner from me and the other interns at The New Republic. Even for a newbie like me, it was difficult to avoid the conclusion David worked differently from others on staff.
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In Washingtonian magazine this month, New York Times book critic Carlos Lozada discussed how he turns the straw of reading political memoirs into the gold of an art form. Read more
How author David Fryxell, former editor of Writer’s Digest, organizes and structures his writing. Read more
Typewriters are like bicycles or stick shift cars. They command your full attention. Make a mistake and you pay the price. In a digital age, that’s more a blessing than a curse. Read more
By definition, popular histories ought to appeal to ordinary book buyers and -readers rather than specialists. And the best among them were not meant to comfort political activists, either. Now that has changed. Read more
Rejection can — can! — be a good thing. Writers must be mulish. You want two lessons from a disappointing week? Here they are. Read more
I am a lover and a practitioner of interviewing people and mining archives. Yet two lesser-known forms of data gathering can be good supplements and even substitutes. Read more
