Tom Swift Writer’s Notebook

I would consider eating my right sneaker if it were covered with truwhip. Luckily, I don’t have to. Not with the raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries coming in this time of year. You may not get — check that: you will not want — another recipe from me (unless you, too, have an irrational affinity for [...]

So, apparently, there is a way to read blogs and web sites other than by visiting each of those blogs and web sites directly. That’s like so cool. What will they come up with next — a way to read those same blogs and web sites on your cell phone? Shut UP! And what do [...]

I dig this profile of genre-bending novelist David Mitchell and it fired me up to write. This slice is a more articulate take on what was I saying yesterday: When writing is effective, Mitchell says, “your mind is nowhere else but in this world that started off in the mind of another human being. There [...]

Novelists, thanks to John Gardner, often talk about The Dream. That is, a gifted storyteller induces a trance in which words on paper project a world as vivid as the one that occupies the mind during deep sleep. The Dream is what allows literature to provide meaningful experience. Even if the story tells of an [...]

… are you going to eat that?

I don’t have an opinion about soccer. Apparently, I’m supposed to. Apparently, I’m supposed to either sneer at soccer like a connoisseur of art regards paint-by-numbers or defend the sport as if its critics were questioning my manhood. I can neither take it nor leave it. I am indifferent. Yet the frenzied anticipation of today’s [...]

If you can’t suck ‘em in any other way, write a header that might rile up some folks — that’s what I always like to say.
A recent study indicates that empathy for others is in decline. The study, conducted by the Michigan University Institute for Social Research, looked at 72 other studies that measured empathy [...]

Fifteen-sixteen months ago, while trying to take my writing in a new direction — I had not written fiction since they took away my crayons — I enrolled in a two-day writing workshop that changed me. Not only did the instructor, Jon Odell, fire me up, he sent me on my way with a box [...]

You don’t usually read the obituaries. Instead, you quickly accordion your way to the weather, or to some other page that does not evoke the inevitable. You do not want to be reminded that someday someone else will brush over the bare bones of your life as he checks to see whether he should carry [...]

I have collected a short stack of notes about libertarianism in recent months with an eye on cobbling together a rant. For some reason, I enjoy shooting into this particular barrel of fish. After I came across an essay over the weekend about the original Glenn Beck, I thought I would cease with my laziness [...]

From Winston Churchill:
“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

Does exercise have a cumulative effect? This column suggests as much — and the best part is that every ten minutes counts.

“If we were all logicians the economy would not survive and herein lies the paradox, for in order to exist economically we must try by might and main to remain stupid.” So said Jules Henry, circa 1964. I did not think of that quote this afternoon while on a ten-minute drive during which I  heard [...]

Quit Facebook and suddenly it becomes the only topic. On the street, people look at you funny. Funnier, I mean. They ask you Why? But you can tell they really want to ask you Are you going to move to a cabin in the woods to be closer to the squirrels who now presumably constitute [...]

From Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Learning to Write”:
“If you are to continue to be a law to yourself, you must beware of the first signs of laziness. This idealism in honesty can only be supported by perpetual effort; the standard is easily lowered, [and] the artist who says ‘It will do,’ is on [...]

Even before I read the first word of this article I had a visceral reaction to it. The accompanying photographs — my eyes tend to skip over photographs in magazines — affected me in a manner that is difficult to articulate. I knew, immediately I knew, I was not going to like what I was [...]

Speak of the devil … the inestimable Diane Rehm spent an hour earlier this week doing just that.

From Henry Seidel Canby’s “Seven Years’ Harvest”:
“The idea is too commonly expressed that a little grammar and spelling will accomplish what really needs a mental development. Good English comes from a good mind, and no other. And if the mind is good and the English irregular there may be merit to its irregularity.”

What is it about female writers named Miller? I so disliked Sue Miller’s The Senator’s Wife that I will not anytime soon consider reading another of her novels, no matter how many of them land on the New York Times bestseller list. Judith Miller, of course, helped sell the public on a bogus war. And [...]

Kevin Horrigan offers a pleasurable read on the the topic everyone is screaming about. By the way, speaking of plugging holes, Mr. Beck …