In The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch has written an essential and terrifying article describing what she calls “The End of Reading.” I enthusiastically encourage you to set aside 15 minutes and read it. Thinkers have been decrying the end of reading for many decades, citing causes from television to video games. That doesn’t make Horowitch wrong….
I do a fair amount of work for free or below market rate. It’s usually working on committees that are creating useful things. Here are my criteria: It’s pretty simple. If it fits these criteria, I enjoy the work, I enjoy the people, and I can look back on the work I did and find…
A mensch (from the Yiddish, rhymes with wrench) is a person of high integrity; a serious, dependable person. While it originated as a gendered term, it’s gone beyond that. There are plenty of women who are mensches and plenty of men who are not. If you are a mensch, and you ask for my help,…
You just drafted Chapter 2. You shared it with your developmental editor, who suggested a bunch of changes. What do you do next? Disciplined writers start work on Chapter 3. Undisciplined writers repeatedly revise work already written — a habit of continual polishing. That’s a habit I want you to break. Continual polishing is the…
Payton Pritchard is a solidly built 6-foot 1-inch guard on the NBA’s Boston Celtics. Nearly every time he appears in a game, he’s the shortest man on the court. In Sunday night’s game against the Philadelphia 76ers in Philadelphia, Game 4 of the first round of the playoffs, Pritchard scored 32 points in 35 minutes…
I work on book projects for hire. Nonfiction authors pay me to help with ideas, get coaching, edit their books, or ghostwrite their books. There are three approaches people take when reaching out to me. The three approaches Imagine my inbox, which is stuffed with all sorts of publishing news, people who want me to…
Newsletter 146. Writing trains minds, while outsourcing it to AI leaves you stupefied. Plus AI as writing collaborator, editors who upload your manuscript to AI, three people to follow, three books to read, and how you can establish that you’re not just data. Writing is thinking. AI can’t do that for you. “I didn’t really…
Each of us must now daily deal with organizational stupidity. It might be stupid policies at your job, stupid rules of your homeowners association, stupid government and tax policies, or the stupid way the health care system works. But the result is the same: a set of rules set up ostensibly for good and reasonable…
Newsletter 144. Why writers must embrace “less is more,” and what to do about it. Plus, how Shy Girl was outed as AI-generated, why AI illiterates will be unemployable, three people to follow and three books to read. Shorter I don’t know what’s wrong with what you wrote. But I know how to fix it….