the writing life
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Quit Your Day Job
So what happened in those eight missing years to make a well-reviewed, commercially successful author fall so far so fast? Heartbreak? Rehab? Addiction to designer shoes? Easy. She took the wrong day job. The conundrum of how to support yourself…
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Refinancing the Writing Life
The system for determining worth and value strikes me as terribly strange, and it occurs to me that it just might require a suspension of disbelief. Luckily for me, I know something about that. For Salon, Rachel Basch writes about…
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The Fossils of Storytelling
For the New Yorker, John McPhee writes about our dwindling frames of references: Frames of reference are like the constellation of lights, some of them blinking, on an airliner descending toward an airport at night. You see the lights. They imply a…
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So You Think You Can Write?
A recent poll shows that the majority of Brits would choose the writing life as their ideal career. At the Guardian, Tim Lott isn’t sure they could handle it: To master dialogue, description, subtext, plot, structure, character, time, point of view, beginnings,…
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Word of the Day: Excogitate
(v.); to think out, devise or invent; to study intently in order to fully comprehend; from the Latin ex (“out of”) + co (“together”) + agitare (“to turn over”) “Many authors dream of a happy ending in which, having delivered…
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Disappearing Digital Ink
Writers like to believe their words will make them immortal. But in the digital age, most writing careers outlive publications. Carter Maness discovered that most of his career as a music journalist has faded from existence as the publications that…
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Writing and Collecting
When I left the house on Pace Street and moved to Vermont, I became a writer. I became a writer because I was so broken down by early motherhood that I stopped fearing criticism long enough to throw my work…
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A Career No More
Writing books has become a hobby for the wealthy, writes Toby Young over at the Telegraph. Writers’ incomes have dropped 29% since 2005, he points out, and even when writers are getting paid, it’s never enough: I wrote another book…
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The Joy of Writing
What happens when writing ceases to be enjoyable? Over at Beyond the Margins, Dell Smith discusses how the joy of writing must eventually yield to the joy of a finished draft because while writing first drafts might be pleasurable, the…
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How to Be a Writer and Also Have a 401K
At The Morning News, seven writers with full-time jobs talk about how they fit (or attempt to fit) writing time into their work weeks, and the general conclusion is: There isn’t an elegant solution to cramming a writing life into…
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Table Talk
At The Believer Logger, 14 writers sat down with Elisa Gabbert to talk reading, writing, reading without writing, writing in the midst of reading, willfully neglecting both, dutifully submitting to one or the other, and their relationships with the two.