Andy Unedited
Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
Coauthors have a problem. How do you speak about yourselves in a book or article? Who is the “I” in your piece? Do you always use “we”? But what if you are telling a story of one author but not the other? Do you always say “I (Andy) once . . .”? But that can …
Teachers and nonfiction writers are sometimes hesitant to tell stories. Just giving the content straight seems so much better. People can get the wrong point from a story, after all. Stories can be subjective, vague, striking different people different ways. We don’t want people confused. And some may like a particular story and others not. …
Recently a friend asked an interesting question after reading my blog on writer’s block. He wrote: Andy, I wonder if I need some writer’s block. I don’t have a problem with getting started. Rather, as I jokingly tell students, I’ve never met a word count I couldn’t exceed. I am working on my first solo, …
Retirement isn’t an idea you find in the Bible. Yes, the march of time slows us down, and we need to transition to a new rhythm, allowing the next generation to take the lead. But sipping drinks with little umbrellas by the beach for months on end is not the ambition recommended by Peter, Paul, …
What if you wanted to send a message to someone in the future. Would you need a time machine? Would you have to reverse the polarity on your deflector array to transmit a message through a supernova? Maybe you would need to harness the power of a black hole to energize the system. That might …
One measure of how much I like a book is by how much I keep talking about it. In one way or another it has captured me, provoked me, stayed with me. Here are twelve, in no particular order, that I’ve read in the last two years which I keep thinking about. As they range …
One way or another we all fall victim to writer’s block. But it can come in many forms. It is not just a blank screen that sits forever mocking our lack of output. Sometimes it means we just move at a very slow pace. Our perfectionism kicks in so we fuss over every sentence before …
They say, America’s polarized in unprecedented ways. Is that true? Consider the election held in 1800 too. Just twelve years after ratifying the Constitution, President John Adams ran for re-election against his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson. The rhetoric was superheated by hyperpartisan media, making it one of the country’s most acrimonious episodes. Jon Meacham’s …
Matt Ruff’s fun supernatural novel, Lovecraft Country, is an homage to H. P. Lovecraft and his spooky, weird pulp fiction of the last century. Yet it is also an incisive critique of Lovecraft’s bigotry. Set in Chicago in 1954, the novel follows a series of exploits of an extended family and their friends as they …
Over my forty years at InterVarsity Press I crossed paths with J. I. Packer a number of times. This soft-spoken and steady British theologian, who died this past week, became something of an accidental celebrity when his substantive book Knowing God suddenly became a best seller. When, as a newly minted InterVarsity campus staff member …