David Moldawer

Just a quick one this morning to help propel you through the final days of NaNoWriMo [https://nanowrimo.org/]. Or at least shake off the funk of Black Friday buyer’s remorse. If you’re a regular reader, you might wonder why I look for ideas everywhere but the world

In The Craft of Writing [https://bookshop.org/books/the-craft-of-writing/9780393300505], the editor William Sloane writes that the ability to tell a good story, the “narrative faculty,” can’t be taught: > Its techniques can be discussed—foreshadowing, for instance, or the structure of scenes in fiction and nonfiction, perhaps

In a 1982 interview [http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/musn82.htm], Brian Eno said: > My reputation is far bigger than my sales. I was talking to Lou Reed the other day and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the

A couple of years have passed since Stanley Kubrick’s death. His assistant Tony Frewin invites journalist and documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson to the late director’s house. There, Ronson is to be given the rare opportunity of studying Kubrick’s archives. No, not the archived films themselves, but all

By the time I got around to writing my final college admission essay, I already felt beaten. It had been brutally hard work presenting myself in the best possible light. In each previous essay, I’d prevaricated with a vengeance, glossing over my many defects as a college candidate: mediocre

The expression “to have your work cut out for you” originally meant “preparing what you need to accomplish a task smoothly and efficiently,” just as a tailor’s assistant cut out the necessary pieces of cloth for the boss to get right to work. By the time the idiom appeared

Maybe it’s the turn of the season—and what a winter this one promises to be—but I’ve been thinking about the meaning and importance of my work. What-am-I-doing-here questions. Lately, I’ve been dipping into A Mathematician’s Apology by G.H. Hardy. Hardy turned to writing

> It’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools.Anonymous My tools are terrible. Nothing works the way I want it to work. And if it does work, it takes too long to work. Maybe I should just learn to program so I can make tools that work for

In 2007, Marc Andreessen wrote a blog post [https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_personal_productivity.html] explaining his unusual approach to getting things done. He offered advice ranging from “don’t keep a schedule” so you can “work on whatever is most important or most interesting, at any time”—sounds

“I read your latest newsletter.” If you write one of these too, you may be familiar with the sinking feeling a statement like this evokes. What’d I do now? Am I in trouble? Once, someone called me in tears about something I’d written in the Maven Game… “When