These books help me write better
Revealing people’s capacity for empathy is the difference between writing that’s macabre and humane.
If you can observe and write about the space between things, then a book like this one, which basically says, despite everything, I love my Dad, can also contain a universe of understanding about life and death and forgiveness.
Plot can also be another form of setting. What matters most is a character’s interiority. Lyrical writing relies on developing an emotional rhythm.
Violence is more meaningful if readers get to know the victims and the perpetrators.
Dignity and tragedy reside in unfinished business.
The key to good travel writing is accepting the physical journey is not the story. William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways demonstrates how you blend physical and metaphysical journeys.
Ever wondered what people really mean by 'show, don't tell?" If in doubt, read Cormac McCarthy, especially The Road. Compound the reader’s sense of being present by underlining the urgency of now.
Waugh's preternatural ability to observe and describe people helps him walk the fine line between sentiment and cheese. Readers will move the line between drama and melodrama depending on how much they care about the characters.
Controlling details can help you write about personal tragedy. Controlling perspective helps your reader sympathise with it.
Less really is more.
Less isn't more when more is more.
Your characters are allowed to be happy. At least for a little while.
Stories about small things can help you write about big things. The simplest of words can be arranged to make the most sophisticated sentences about the most complex ideas.
No one truly writes alone. Perkins’ unconventional writing advice was prized by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. Berg’s masterful biography of Max Perkins, Editor of Genius, allows us to eavesdrop on conversations between the great editor and his writers about story craft and managing self-doubt. As instructive as it is reassuring.
How to Write Video Tutorials
Video demonstrating how to shift time when writing a narrative.