Left this in another thread, but here's the definitive profile of Ramis, by Tad Friend of The New Yorker. It examines the how and why Ramis's movies have stayed so funny for so many years. The author has unlocked it for the next 24 hours:
Hi. Some excellent suggestions in this thread already. Here are a few more.
1. Read great writing. If you want to write better nonfiction, read the masters of nonfiction. Michael Lewis. Tracy Kidder. Atul Gawande. Joseph Mitchell. Jon Krakauer. Christopher Hitchens. Tom Junod. If you want to write great fiction, read Murakami, Marquez, Palahniuk, Eggers, Hosseni, Oates, Atwood. (Shameless plug here, you can find stories by these folk at Byliner: http://www.byliner.com )
2. Read about writing. Some worthy books on this:
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King (really!)
The Practice of Writing, by David Lodge
The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott
Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd
To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, by Phillip Lopate
3. As already mentioned upthread, practice. Write something every day.
4. If you're not confident in your writing, apply your MVP lessons. Write short sentences. Use as few words as possible. Rid your sentences of adjectives and adverbs. Study your verb choices. Ditch the complex punctuation and dependent clauses. Ask yourself, What's the least amount of "writing" necessary to convey this idea or image?
> On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King (really!)
I can't second this enough. I read it once a year, at least. King's writing nonfiction, he's writing nonfiction about writing, and yet his command of his own literary voice is so strong that you feel like he's sitting on the other side of the table from you. It's an amazing, honest book.
I don't think reading great writing can be stressed enough. It helps you find a tone that you like and can take the pressure off of trying to find 'your own style'.
For a good variety of nonfiction, try longform.org.
If you are able to get interested in a wide range of topics, longform is a treasure trove.
This is indeed an awesome list of amazing stories, as chosen by Kevin and his crowd-sourcing friends.
KK's a friend of Byliner, and all of the pieces from this list are also on Byliner.com, although organized by writer, for convenience. Thus, if you like a specific story, you can easily do a deep dive into that writer's full body of work, which often includes dozens more great stories. (Think of it as a Github or Dribble page for that writer.) And if you read a full-text story as a subscriber, the author actually splits all subscription revenue generated by their story. It's an exciting model, and we have more than two hundred of the world's best writers on our network already, selling 1M+ stories directly to their readers. You can explore some of our writers here:
If you're looking for a DRM-free version, we made that available via Apple's iBookstore and Google's eBookstore (now known as Google Play). A print-on-demand version is available via Blurb.com. All of these buying options are reachable from the book's page on Byliner:
One aspect of Byliner that's interesting (we hope) is the ability for authors to either update their stories, or provide detail behind their stories. A good example is Jon Krakauer's Three Cups of Deceit. In the months since its publication Jon has added 20,000 words of updates to his story:
Most of our authors continue to evolve their stories after publication, to the benefit of readers. We hope that Professor Lessig does the same with One Way Forward, which we were very proud to publish.
Maybe I'm just in a bad mood right now, but for whatever reason I find this excerpt really uninspiring. There's no doubt that amateurization of culture and politics is part of the solution, but at the same time it's pretty much a non-answer. He's basically just saying we need to wait 50 or 100 years for the world to change, and even then it's a pretty big leap of faith.
I don't think you'll feel that way about the full book. Send me an email (info in my profile) and I'll send you a complimentary copy. If you enjoy it, you can amend your comment; if not, no foul.
But people can start disintermediating their lives right now, without having to wait for 'the world' to change. We're seeing more and more of this - it's once again becoming prevalent for individuals families to grow their own food, educate their own children, generate their own energy, etc., and there are a growing body of open, substantive 'amateur' resources for them to turn to for external guidance.
It might take 50 or 100 years for these movements to become dominant, and for the modern institutional centralization of culture and politics to fully recede, but it seems that the way it's most likely to happen is for the 'issues' we now fight over to fade into irrelevance as people gradually cease being dependent on the context of those 'issues', not by one faction or another winning some sort of pitched conflict and imposing reform from the top, downward. I'd think that the success of a top-down reform program would actually demonstrate the failure of its motivating intention.
Perhaps it's just me, but I am unable to purchase it on Google Play. There is simply no "Purchase" button. I'd like to purchase a DRM-free version, but I don't own any Apple products. Is this a problem on your end, or is it just me?
OK - so I'm accessing this on my mobile device, and I read through all the smug, self-congratulatory crap that just oozes cleverness, and I get to the link to the puzzle, and it's a Word document?
At least I assume it is. My device asks if I want to download this file with a "doc" extension.
I'm guessing it's part of the puzzle. There's nothing "puzzly" about the contents of the doc-file, and the fact that it's a doc-file should arouse suspicion, just like you picked up. I've been going through the file with a hex editor but haven't found any notable hidden strings yet. Since I am in Europe and have no desire to go anyway, I've stopped trying to figure it out.
No. Just decipher the thing for yourself and go find those geeks. If you spoil it for everybody else, they'll just declare the effort null and void (they did not solve the puzzle themselves) and immediately release a new puzzle, which means your efforts will come to naught.
https://www.byliner.com/tad-friend/stories/comedy-first?AFID...