Writing Craft The fear that planning will drain the life out of your story is real — but so is the blank-page drift that strands most unplanned drafts. There’s a middle way. Ask a room of novelists how they plan their books and you’ll start a small war. On one side are the outliners — … Read more
Writing Craft The most repeated writing advice is also the most misunderstood — including the part where you’re sometimes supposed to ignore it. “Show, don’t tell” is the most famous piece of writing advice in the English language, and also one of the most misapplied. Every workshop repeats it, every craft book enshrines it, … Read more
Writing Craft Good dialogue sounds like real speech but does work real speech never does. Here’s the difference, and how to write it. Dialogue is where a lot of otherwise promising fiction quietly falls apart. The description is vivid, the premise is strong, and then the characters open their mouths and the whole thing deflates … Read more
Self-Education Through Books Reading about a skill feels like progress. Often it’s the most comfortable way to avoid the discomfort of actually getting better at it. There’s a trap that catches thoughtful, bookish people more than anyone, precisely because they’re thoughtful and bookish. You want to get good at something — cooking, coding, writing, … Read more
Self-Education Through Books You can get remarkably far on self-study — if you read like a student instead of a fan, and know exactly what books can’t give you. It is one of the quiet privileges of literacy that almost any field of human knowledge is, in principle, available to anyone willing to read. The … Read more
Self-Education Through Books Before search engines and note apps, thinkers kept everything worth remembering in one book. The method still works — arguably better than what replaced it. Here is a problem every reader knows intimately. You read something genuinely striking — a sentence that reframes how you see things, a fact you want … Read more
Self-Education Through Books A pile of recommended books isn’t an education. A sequence is. Here’s how to design your own. There’s a particular kind of ambition that strikes most curious people sooner or later: the desire to really learn a subject — not dabble, not skim a few articles, but understand it the way someone … Read more
The Craft of Reading Why the Second Pass Teaches You More Than the First There’s a quiet prejudice against rereading. With so many books in the world and so little time, returning to one you’ve already finished can feel like a waste — a failure of ambition, even, when the unread shelf stretches on … Read more
The Craft of Reading Writing in your books isn’t vandalism. It’s a conversation — and it makes you a sharper reader. A lot of people would no sooner write in a book than scratch their initials into a painting. The book arrives clean and unmarked, and there’s a quiet instinct to keep it that way … Read more
The Craft of Reading The 1,000-words-a-minute promise is mostly marketing. But a few of the underlying techniques are real, and worth knowing. Speed reading is one of those self-improvement ideas that refuses to die, partly because the promise is so seductive: read three times faster, finish a book in an afternoon, devour your entire … Read more