Content tagged with "writing"

I bought this book because I’ve come to understand that my career basically resolves around explaining things to people. So, I’m trying to develop that talent, and this book seemed like something short that I could read on a flight home. The only thing I took away from the first half is this: never…

You need to understand that this isn’t a book about the process of writing . This is really a meandering memoir of a particular writer’s life. I keep looking for some constructive instructional value, but it’s buried pretty deep. Mostly, McPhee just wants to tell stories. And, to be fair, some of…

I have no idea why I bought this – I think I just wanted to know how writing about art would be different than anything else. And it was quite good. It very much becomes a general book about writing, especially later in the book, but the early sections have a lot of examples about art writing and…

This book is ambitious in trying to teach us all how to write an effective short form, but it’s hit or miss. It’s a firehose of information which sort of defies attempts to read it casually. There’s a lot there, and each chapter has exercises that you’re supposed to do – and I believe you do need to…

One of the greatest books every written on writing. Zinsser strikes the perfect balance between a strategic and tactical approach to what writers do. He mixes good perspective with practical advice. The first part is all plans and strategy. He’s big on clarity – every word should serve a purpose. If…

I enjoyed the book, but maybe it should mention that it’s fundamentally about fiction. I was hoping for something about storytelling in a business context, but this is about novels and films and such. In fact, there’s a long appendix will explores the structure of a novel that the author took from…

This is a book that describes the U.S. intelligence community so that spy novel writers can describe it more accurately. Note the subtitle: How to Write Spy Novels, TV Shows and Movies Accurately and Not Be Laughed at by Real-Life Spies The book delivers on what it says – it’s a very stark…

Interesting, full of pictures, but it got ponderous. Weirdly long, because it’s basically a picture book, but with a lot of text, so you spend a lot of time starting and ending sections, and looking at captions. You don’t really get in a narrative flow. Almost a coffee table book, really.

Here are some notes I took on the acquisition of this book:

Isabella got this from a stack of used books at USF.

Margot really hits on the thing we all sort of know about content but don’t acknowledge: some content, we just don’t trust, and some content we do. We probably don’t even acknowledge that at any conscious level, but when we talk about “good content” we’re talking content that we trust. I almost…

I bought this because I want to get better at explaining things. It was…okay? What’s sad, is that finished it a couple weeks ago, and I honestly can’t remember anything about it worth writing. I do remember it being quite basic. It has a lot of examples as well, which I was nice. But, seriously,…

Robert Caro writes a very particular type of book. He hasn’t written that many, but they were huge and detailed. He wrote a book called The Power Broker which was a 1,200 biography of the NYC city planner Robert Moses. Caro won a Pulitzer for that. He won another Pulitzer for one of the installments…

I abandoned this at about the halfway point, for two reasons: I probably wasn’t the right audience. It’s geared toward more novice writers. It’s fundamentally a book of exercises . Each chapter is a writing prompt that you’re supposed to actually sit down and do, and I wasn’t that interested. Don’t…

Unfortunately, I didn’t like this book, and it pains me to write this, since I had just finished “On Writing Well” for the third time, and it’s amazing. But this book…it just didn’t do anything for me. Zinsser presents this as an examination of writing non-fiction, and how this type of writing can…