About Editing and Writing

From the Miami Herald:

By Dave Barry

There was a time when going to Target did not feel like a daring and dangerous mission. That time, of course, was long ago, by which I mean last week. The good old days!

It’s different now. Now we are hunkering in our homes and keeping our social distance. We are also trying not to panic, which is difficult because every 14 seconds some health authority reminds us that this thing is going to get worse before it gets better and we don’t really know WHEN it will get better so for now you need to use common sense and remain calm and not panic and just REMAIN CALM BECAUSE THERE IS NO REASON TO PANIC even though we have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN and …

From a Wall Street Journal story by Sumathi Reddy titled “A Prescription of Poetry”:

Dr. Joshua Hauser approached the bedside of his patient, treatment in hand. But it wasn’t medicine he carried. It was a copy of a 19th-century poem titled “Invictus.”

From Literary Hub:

What time of day do you write?
Mornings due to coffee. It’s good to get the morning coffee on the page. Afternoon coffee is not the same. In fact, afternoon coffee might be tea.

How do you tackle writers block?
All these terms are a little alien to me. Tackle is very sporty. And I’m not sure I’ve had writer’s block per se. Nor am I convinced that if I had it trying to tackle it would be a good idea, even if I knew where and how to begin. Because I have a job and am a single head of household, my problem is simply not having the free time to write. My problems do not involve sitting at the desk twiddling my thumbs with something called “writer’s block.” Should one “tackle” writer’s block? Perhaps one should rope-a-dope it! Maybe knock it out of the park. Because what’s it doing there in the park anyway.

From a New York Times story, by Lawrence Wright, about his new novel  The End of October and its parallels to the current coronavirus pandemic:

My new novel, “The End of October,” which comes out next month, is a work of imagination. The book is not prophecy, but its appearance in the middle of the worst pandemic in living memory is not entirely coincidental either. It began with a simple question from the filmmaker Ridley Scott, who had read Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic 2006 novel “The Road” and asked me, “What happened?” How could human civilization become so broken? How could we fail to preserve the institutions and social order that define us when we are confronted with something unexpected—a catastrophe that in retrospect seems all but inevitable?

From the Writer’s Almanac, a website produced by Garrison Keillor:

Today is the birthday of Sid Fleischman, born in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in San Diego, and as a teenager toured the country with vaudeville acts as a magician. After college he became a journalist, and then he started writing suspense novels and screenplays.

One day, his daughter Jane came home from school with the autograph of a children’s author. Fleischman’s wife, Betty, pointed out to the children that their father was also a writer. Jane said, “Yes, but no one reads his books.”

This Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine features its annual spring  travel guide with the cover featuring “The Soul and Serendipity of India.” Also featured as places to go are Seoul, South Korea, and Lisbon, Portugal.

Ah, the curse of early deadlines faced by all magazine editors. You start planning the issue three months ahead and wrap it up two or three weeks before publication. Then you hope nothing big happens before publication. One time at the Washingtonian we had a very tough piece on a man who died a week before the magazine came out. It was hard to explain it to readers.

From the book Innovators by Walter Isaacson:

We humans can remain relevant in an era of cognitive computing because we are able to think differently, something that an algorithm, almost be definition, can’t master. We possess an imagination that brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions in new, original, endless, every-varying combinations. We discern patterns  and appreciate their beauty. We weave information into narratives. We are storytellers as well as social animals.

From the March 14th Writer’s Almanac, a website produced by Garrison Keillor:

It was on this day in 1939 that John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath was published. Between 1936 and 1938, Steinbeck drove an old bakery truck around California’s Central Valley, visiting migrant camps and writing articles about their terrible conditions for The San Francisco News. In his first article, he wrote: “They are never allowed to feel at home in the communities that demand their services.”

From a column by former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel in the Wall Street Journal titled “Democratic Voters Smash Media Myths”:

In Washington, few lines are as hackneyed as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s aphorism that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” That’s true, but it’s also true that pundits can sometimes twist a few “facts” into a false narrative. Consider three widely accepted misconceptions about the Democratic Party—each of them debunked by the outcome of the primaries to date.