Jennifer Egan writes both. I love her take on the difference: There is nothing the same about them. For nonfiction, the writing part is almost an afterthought. With nonfiction, it is basically the job of synthesizing a gigantic amount of information and experience into something crystalline and relatively short, although my pieces are relatively long. [...]

Apparently some copy editors have taken issue with Pico Iyer’s use of long sentences. In today’s Los Angeles Times, he makes an eloquent case for them (while employing them often), explaining that he uses them “as a small protest against — and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from — the bombardment of [...]

The world lost a great writer recently, and I lost a good friend. Joel Deutsch — poet, essayist, novelist — died in Los Angeles. Joel devoted his life to learning and writing. Thanks to a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts, he edited and published a highly regarded journal, Meatball. Later, he wrote [...]

Ernest Hemingway bought his beloved boat, Pilar, in a shipyard in Brooklyn in 1934. Could the ensuing time he spent on the boat have altered his writing style? At least one writer thinks so. Paul Hendrickson is the author of the new book, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961. (Given all [...]

Really enjoying David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. It’s mostly a transcript of conversations between Lipsky and DFW over five days in March 1996, while Wallace was on a book tour for “Infinite Jest.” As you might expect, DFW comes across as brilliant but [...]

Just read Stephen King’s On Writing. Loved this bit about the craft of writing fiction and, well, something else altogether: At its most basic, we are only discussing a learned skill, but do we not agree that sometimes the most basic skills can create things far beyond our expectations? We are talking about tools and [...]

Novelist and short story writer Jim Shephard was just featured in a half-hour interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. I liked what he said about the appeal of writing short stories. I’m getting more and more impatient with what I call the ‘furniture moving’ involved novels, you know, that sense you have, when you’re reading early [...]

I love This American Life, so I was happy to come across video of its brilliant host talking about storytelling. In the first of four videos, Glass describes the building blocks of stories for radio and TV. In the other three short videos — you can click from one to the next — he discusses [...]

Love this, from a collection of passages from writers on writing: I construct sentences. There’s a rhythm I hear that drives me through a sentence. And the words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality. They form odd correspondences. They match up not just through meaning but through sound and look. The rhythm [...]

I like the way former U.S. poet laureate Charles Simic puts it in this interview: Prose is like walking to the store to buy a holiday ham; poetry is like standing on the corner and whistling. It’s a difference between wanting to tell a story or express a series of ideas, and wanting to speak [...]