Word: writings
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...Some weeks ago, Randy Michaels, COO of the Tribune newspaper group - the second largest in the nation - mused in a conference call with investors that while the company's salespeople were judged by their performance, "nobody has ever said, 'How many column inches does a journalist write?'" The problem is, productivity quotas are anathema to one of journalism's core duties, investigative reporting - an expensive enterprise that can consume months of a writer's time and often yield few results. With money at major news organizations tightening, editors and publishers are being faced with an uncomfortable question: who is worth...
...shaping up to be the sleeper hit of the summer, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and a veteran computer programmer, can't name any. "I'm a little surprised that it's so hard to think of at least one other example," he says, noting that the impulse to write fiction is hardly uncommon among people used to writing in code. "I've run into lots and lots of people in the software world who say, 'Yeah I used to write in college and have a novel in the drawer at home...
Like a coder, Wroblewski set to work trying to understand the elements of narrative structure from experienced writers at school, and endlessly hacked his manuscript. "You develop a lot of habits when you write software that are helpful in writing novels," he says. "One of them is simply holding in your mind a very large, complicated structure of some kind. A complex set of moving parts." Likewise, he usability-tested his manuscript, debugging it by talking "some poor slob into reading it and telling me which parts worked and which didn't." Over a decade, he wrote eight drafts. Only...
...pilot. It was a job he held just briefly, but the memory of the river, its enchantments and dangers, found its way years later into his most powerful book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It also found its way into his pen name. Mark Twain, the name he began to write under in 1863, was a river man's term meaning a depth of two fathoms...
...star." We know his voice only from written descriptions of it. It was resonant enough to hold a large lecture-hall audience rapt. He spoke in a slow backwoods drawl, with many strategic pauses. In 1891 he experimented with an Edison dictating machine but concluded that "you can't write literature with it." (He liked to have a human secretary taking notes and laughing in the right places.) But he wasn't the sort of funny man who laughs at his own jokes. In performance and in life, Twain's facial expression--except, presumably, when he was furious, which...