Andy Unedited
Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
Robert Caro’s book on Robert Moses and four books on Lyndon Johnson are legendary for their length (a total of almost 5,000 pages) and the length between volumes (about a decade). In Working, a collection of interviews and articles, we learn something of the method in his madness. His passion is not just to inform …
Charitable Writing Just released is a terrific resource by Richard Gibson and James Beitler entitled Charitable Writing. I was glad to offer this endorsement: “Who we are is absolutely foundational for anything we write. Gibson and Beitler take us to the heart of this largely unexamined principle. Without being grounded as people, our writing will …
Hear are a few, brief, miscellaneous items of interest. (See the last piece regarding this string of adjectives.) Click on the Headline Some of you who subscribe to Andy Unedited have mentioned that the font size is small in the email alert you receive. If you just click on the headline of the blog found …
Do I get letters? Yes. I get letters. Dear Mr. Editor Person: Often I read words or phrases that make my grammatical hair stand on end, my syntactical stomach churn, and my semantical head bow in grief. Someone uses “impact” as if it were a verb or “ask” as if it were a noun, and …
Should authors blog through the books they are writing? This does not have a one-size-fits-all answer. I wish I could have said a bit more about it in Write Better where careful readers may have thought they spotted a contradiction. In the preface I say, “Some of what is found in this book was originally …
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, …
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 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 …