Notebook Versus Laptop
I work in a tech company where most of the employees hover around the age of thirty. They grew up with computers. They are experts in Apple devices. They live and die by technology. I come in as the oldster…
Category: Writing
It’s The Company You Keep
I used to hang around a bunch of poets. Not because I liked them—they were snobbish in their elegiac greatness—but because as poets, they were guaranteed to get rejected more often than I. My novel was dead in the water while…
The (Full) Writing Life
Go Figure: Musings from the Mind of Rob Wilstein My mother was on the phone. The old black desk model with its rotary dial. She was writing with one hand, the receiver clenched between shoulder and ear, the coiled cord…
How to Write a Page-Turner: Pacing Essays & Novels
The Da Vinci Code is fast paced, a “page-turner.” Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is not. We don’t need Writer’s Digest to define narrative pace as how quickly or slowly the writer takes a reader through the story. And…
Friday Feast: Debunking the 10,000-Hours Rule, Scorched Earth Novels, the Importance of Sensitivity Reading, How to Promote Your Book Without Being Annoying, and an “Embarrassingly Inefficient (but Surprisingly Effective) Writing Process”
Back when I had time to take kung fu and tai chi classes, I hung on to the hope of the 10k hour myth because I wanted to believe that all that time spent in class would turn me into some…
Turning Music into Narrative
It’s no secret that 2016 has been a rough year for pop musicians. Did someone set off a slow-acting neutron bomb that kills platinum-sellers? Paul Kantner (Jefferson Airplane), Merle Haggard, David Bowie, Maurice White (Earth, Wind & Fire), and Prince,…