Fifty years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. issued his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” responding to local clergy who felt King and others were moving too quickly, too disruptively in advancing civil rights. To mark the occasion, IVP has published Ed Gilbreath’s ebook short Remembering Birmingham, which puts King’s letter in historical context and offers reflections on its significance then and now.
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Author: Andy Le Peau
I've been an editor and writer for over forty years. I am passionate about ideas and how we can express them clearly, beautifully, and persuasively. I love reading good books, talking about them, and recommending them. I thoroughly enjoy my family who help me continue on the path of a lifelong learner.
The Silver Lining on Doom and Gloom
Here’s a doom-and-gloom article about the publishing industry with a twist: it might not all be doom and gloom.
Despite the continual stream of stories about authors making $10,000 a month or more on self-published ebooks and in the process crushing traditional publishing out of existence, Evan Hughes in Wired magazine (April 2013) says there’s another side of the story.
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Good Prose 4: Being Edited
Once I was harassing (in a good-natured way, of course) an editor I knew well from another publisher about a book she had put out. It was a biography that was overwritten and frequently lapsed into a sentimentalized caricature of the main subject. How could she have let that go through? “Oh,” she said, smiling. “You should have seen it before we edited it!” I knew exactly what she was talking about.
Good Prose 3: The Business of Writing
Writers and publishers have always had a love-hate relationship. Mark Twain once offered “the perfect recipe for a modern American publisher” as follows: “Take an idiot from a lunatic asylum and marry him to an idiot woman and the fourth generation of this connection should be a good publisher.”*
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Good Prose 2: The Problem with Memoir
I’ve read more than one memoir and wondered, “Did this really happen? Is the author remembering correctly or perhaps just making things up entirely?” Memoir is a knotty genre. Can we trust it? Should we? Can a book be truthful even if it isn’t factual?
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Good Prose 1: Talking to Strangers
“To write is to talk to strangers.”
Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd practice what they preach by starting their book Good Prose quietly, with a sentence at once disarming and muscular. Indeed, the whole book is about this one, deceptively simple, nearly passive, seven-word sentence. Its rhythm is as beguiling as its substance is vital.
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A Visit to Our Lawyer
Recently my wife and I were revising our wills. (Don’t worry, kids. You’re still in.) You see, we figure every twenty years or so we ought to take a look, you know, whether things have changed or not. And, of course, we got all the standard boilerplate stuff from our lawyer. And that was good.
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Cut the Clutter
For thirty-five years I’ve been recommending William Zinsser’s On Writing Wel. It is the essential book on the craft, especially for new writers. Zinsser zeroes in on all the myths, bad habits and misunderstandings people have when they start writing.
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Les Misérables You Never Knew
With the release of the movie version of the musical Les Misérables, friends and foes alike have debated its merits, demerits–loving it and hating it for being and not being faithful to the original stage production. Here’s an excerpt from A Deeper Look at James, forthcoming from IVP this spring and from my wife, Phyllis, and me, that considers what’s behind both versions of Victor Hugo’s famed book.
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Subtitles, Drama and the Rule of Three
Titles are without a doubt one of the most vital elements for a successful book. But subtitles, while clearly “sub,” still matter a lot.
One way (not the only way) to construct an effective subtitle is by using the Rule of Three. Offering a list with three items gives a rising sense of movement, climax and direction. Consider these subtitles:
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