Today, if you aren’t writing fiction, every single word you put down has to do something for you, or have the potential to do something. We write our diary entries in public on Facebook. We send letters to our friends on Medium. Our culture tells us that it’s

You dream of writing a book. In fact, even if you’ve previously written books, you dream of writing another one. Two things are going through your mind right now: 1. He’s reading my mind. That means magic is real. I can fly. I can fly! crash…thump 2.

This article appeared in modified form on Boing Boing [https://boingboing.net/2015/07/16/escaping-the-new-media-cargo-c.html]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What appealed to me about the Web from the start was that what seemed too niche for the “mainstream” could flourish because you had a mechanism (search, links) for reaching all the

It used to be 15 minutes, but then TED came along.As an editor, I judge the strength of a piece of writing by the weight of its emphasis on a single viewpoint. If you read something written (well) by a person with a substantially different way of seeing the

Ben Leventhal, co-founder of Eater, wrote a Medium article entitled “The 9 Habits of Highly Effective Restaurants.” Speaking of which, do we italicize Medium article titles? Use quotes? I’m going to go with vertical bars, a.k.a. pipes. In |The 9 Habits of Highly Effective Restaurants| Ben identified

> Shibumi has to do with great refinement underlying commonplace appearances. It is a statement so correct that it does not have to be bold, so poignant it does not have to be pretty, so true it does not have to be real. —Shibumi, by Trevanian (Writers: There’s nothing

This article first appeared in modified form on the CreativeLive blog [http://blog.creativelive.com/lessons-niche-market-from-creator-of-italics/]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I was reading the wonderful show business biography Act One [https://smile.amazon.com/Act-One-Autobiography-Moss-Hart/dp/1250050898/], by the legendary playwright Moss Hart, when the following passage struck me: > It is taken

This article first appeared in modified form on the CreativeLive blog [http://blog.creativelive.com/lessons-niche-market-from-creator-of-italics/]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- First use of italics by Aldus ManutiusA piece in the New York Times alerted me to a tribute to the Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius on display at New York City’s posh Grolier