Ever since I wrote about my new year’s resolutions to work smarter using better tools, compared my favorite iOS text editors, and shared some of my workflow techniques on Macdrifter, I thought it would be appropriate to share a bit more about the activity that takes up 80% of my work time: writing.

In an epic life of perpetual motion—Paris, Pamplona, Mount Kilimanjaro, Key West, etc.—one place was truly home to Ernest Hemingway: the Finca Vigía, his rustic estate outside Havana. It was kept by the Cuban government as a shrine in the half-century since his suicide, and its full contents remained a mystery until 2002. One of the American team that finally gained access, A. Scott Berg, shares the discovery of a literary treasure trove to celebrate the publication of thousands of never-before-seen letters now to be included in the forthcoming volumes of Hemingway’s collected correspondence.

If you want a good title, you need it before you start, when you’re pumped up with hope. If you look for it afterwards, you end up thinking like a headline-writer. If Victor Hugo had waited until he’d finished Notre-Dame de Paris, he would have ended up calling it I’ve Got a Hunch.

Also: possibly the only article about writing for the screen that references John Arne Riise.

> The first thing you remember writing was a five-page short story about a turtle that left his bale to try to understand life away from other turtles. It was second grade and you weren’t as well read then so you drew upon the only two literary influences you knew: Yertle the Turtle and The Stranger. You entered your story in a school-wide contest. Some fifth-grader won the grand prize with a story about a unicorn that lost his horn and went to live with the horses. You learned a valuable lesson that day about marketability. People love unicorns.

1. Enter a long word.
2. Receive shorter synonyms.

Instructions: paste or compose a document below. Click Check Writing to get feedback on your writing. Click an underlined spelling error, grammar suggestion, or style suggestion to see more options.

deCopia is an online database that names, describes, and thoroughly exemplifies those manifold patterns of syntax and style that make certain specimens of English expression so interesting, effective, beautiful, and unique.

Link to Dropbox. Write Markdown-formatted text. Use your favorite TextExpander snippets. Do quick research to find reference materials. Lookup or substitute words from Terminology app. Insert quotes and links into your documents. Upload images to CloudApp. Export your writings as Markdown or HTML files. Send them to Evernote, Facebook, Posterous, Tumblr and Twitter. Or use the generated HTML for your blog post. Your choice.

Instead, I want to give you a checklist, a quick heuristic diagnostic you can refer to anytime you want to make your headlines sing. Print out the list if you’d like, put it by your desk. But I recommend putting every headline you write through this gamut of questions until they become second nature.

I’d love to run, edit, and write for a publication bigger than just me and my blog. I don’t have time, so I won’t, at least not any time soon. But if I were to run a publication, I’d have a few rules.

Are you also a writer? If so, don’t rely on someone else’s meeting notes. The value isn’t in the notes, it’s in the process of writing them down. You can only do that for yourself.

Good art is a kind of magic. It does magical things for both artist and audience. We can have long polysyllabic arguments about how to describe the way this magic works, but the plain fact is that good art is magical and precious and cool. It’s hard to try and make good art, and it seems to me wholly reasonable that good artists should be concerned with their work’s cultural reception.

It was during the summer of 2009 that I first read the opening paragraph to German novelist Peter Handke’s 1970 novel, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. It remains the most tantalizingly confusing paragraph I’ve ever read.

Found in actual student papers.

If you don't know what Markdown is or how to use it, those articles will probably leave you scratching your head (at best) or angry/frustrated wondering why we're talking about Markdown again.

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

If I’ve done my job, she said in the last class, you won’t be happy with anything you write for the next 10 years. It’s not because you won’t be writing well, but because I’ve raised your standards for yourself. Don’t compare yourselves to each other. Compare yourself to Colette, or Henry James, or Edith Wharton. Compare yourselves to the classics. Shoot there.

In the US, interest has been such that Knopf has already ordered a second print run. In the UK, Bethan Jones, of Harvill Secker, said inquiries from booksellers were running at 10-15 a day. "He is huge in Japan. Here he started out as an alternative, cult author. But this book looks as though it will be immense. It is really unusual for a book in translation, but we have produced a massive print run."

John Swartzwelder is the J. D. Salinger of comedy writing. The prolific Simpsons writer (he's written 59 episodes of The Simpsons, far more than any other writer, even when the show is quickly approaching five hundred episodes) is as well known to his fans for his eccentricities as his writing.

He was allowed to send his scripts in from home because the other writers couldn't stand his chain-smoking. When he could no longer smoke in restaurants, he bought his favorite booth from his favorite diner and had it installed in his home.

Swartzwelder's final Simpsons was in 2003, and since then he has written a novel a year, all self-published, when realistically, he could barge into any publishing house and declare “I've written 20% of all Simpsons episodes” and be handed a contract. I read all eight of Swartzwelder's novels in a row and have put my impressions together here, hopefully in a way that's slightly less absurdist than Swartzwelder's prose.

Hardboiled crime fiction is a literary style, most commonly associated with detective stories, distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex. The style was pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s,[citation needed] popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined by Raymond Chandler beginning in the late 1930s. [1]

The Hardboiled detective: He works alone. He is between 35 and 45 years or so, and both a loner and a tough guy. His usual diet consists of fried eggs, black coffee and cigarettes. He hangs out at shady all-night bars. He is a heavy drinker but always aware of his surroundings and able to fight back when attacked. He always "wears" a gun. He shoots criminals or takes a beating if it helps him solve a case. He is always poor. Cases that at first seem straightforward, often turn out to be quite complicated, forcing him to embark on an odyssey through the urban landscape. He is involved with organized crime and other lowlifes on the "mean streets" of , preferably Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, or Chicago. A hard-boiled private eye has an ambivalent attitude towards the police. It is his ambition to save America and rid it of its mean elements all by himself.

1. Mark Farrington, my first writing teacher at the Johns Hopkins MA Program in Writing in the fall of 1998, suggested we should start sending our stories out “when they are as good as we can make them.” That may seem obvious, but I’ve found it to be a great rule of thumb. Perhaps you’ve had several rounds of feedback, you’ve revised, and while you still see problems, you don’t know how to fix them. When you’ve taken a story as far as you can on your own, send it out.

Whether you write movies or television — or write about them — it’s often helpful to be able to include short blocks of dialogue and scene description. Unfortunately, most blogging and forum systems make it difficult.

Let’s change that.

With Scrippets, you can add boxes of nicely-formatted script to your blog. It even works in comments.

In writing a book, you’re going to find all sorts of interesting ways to mentally beat yourself up. You’re going to consider new tools and different writing schedules. You’ll discover that inspiration can be encouraged, but never created. You’re going to find constructive ways to procrastinate and your friends are going to stop talking to you because all you talk about is that damned book.

Super. In the meantime, let’s write.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Notebooks at the Princeton University Library are in two spring binders with alphabetized index separators. The pages are typed on 8 1/2’’x 11” white paper—except for yellow sheets 1-17 inserted after Z. The white sheets are unnumbered, and it is possible that they are not now in their original order.

In content strategy, there is no playbook of generic strategies you can pick from to assemble a plan for your client or project. Instead, our discipline rests on a series of core principles about what makes content effective—what makes it work, what makes it good. Content may need to have other qualities to work within a particular project, but this list is limited to qualities shared across all sorts of content.

My goal was to find a program I could use to write all my drafts, then be able to export to send to the proofreader/editor, then paste in the final locked words, then export to a nicely formatted and professional looking Kindle file, ready for uploading. I think I've found a one-stop method of doing all that, using Scrivener.

The English chef who studied cooking in Sichuan tells us that there is no one Chinese cuisine, how Western perceptions of Chinese food are changing, and why carrots are called "barbarian radishes" in Mandarin

Lots about Wallace’s style and subjects portend critical success, but almost nothing projects popularity. Why has he earned the sort of following that usually flows to genre writers and canonized masters?

I’ve chosen to deal with my anxiety by tapping into the wisdom of the hive mind. I recently sent email to the authors in my social network and asked them, “What do you wish you’d known about the process of writing a book that you didn’t know before you did it?”

Harmon outlines the basic skeleton of any good story:

1. A character is in a zone of comfort,
2. But they want something.
3. They enter an unfamiliar situation,
4. Adapt to it,
5. Get what they wanted,
6. Pay a heavy price for it,
7. Then return to their familiar situation,
8. Having changed.

THE DETECTIVE story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more — it is a sporting event. And for the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws — unwritten, perhaps, but none the less binding; and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to them. Herewith, then, is a sort Credo, based partly on the practice of all the great writers of detective stories, and partly on the promptings of the honest author's inner conscience. To wit:

INTERVIEWER

Are there significant disadvantages to your present fame?

NABOKOV

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.

With humor you have to look out for traps. You’re likely to be very gleeful with what you’ve first put down, and you think it’s fine, very funny. One reason you go over and over it is to make the piece sound less as if you were having a lot of fun with it yourself. You try to play it down. In fact, if there’s such a thing as a New Yorker style, that would be it— playing it down.

If you were asked to give advice to somebody who wanted to write humorous fiction, what would you tell him?

WODEHOUSE

I’d give him practical advice, and that is always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a great slab of prose at the start. I think the success of every novel—if it’s a novel of action—depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, “Which are my big scenes?” and then get every drop of juice out of them. The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through? I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself if it is all right as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, “This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but I’m such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay,” you’re sunk. If they aren’t in interesting situations, characters can’t be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them.

I write the first draft quickly, as I said. This is most often done in longhand. I simply fill up the pages as rapidly as I can. In some cases, there’s a kind of personal shorthand, notes to myself for what I will do later when I come back to it. Some scenes I have to leave unfinished, unwritten in some cases; the scenes that will require meticulous care later. I mean all of it requires meticulous care—but some scenes I save until the second or third draft, because to do them and do them right would take too much time on the first draft. With the first draft it’s a question of getting down the outline, the scaffolding of the story. Then on subsequent revisions I’ll see to the rest of it. When I’ve finished the longhand draft I’ll type a version of the story and go from there. It always looks different to me, better, of course, after it’s typed up. When I’m typing the first draft, I’ll begin to rewrite and add and delete a little then. The real work comes later, after I’ve done three or four drafts of the story. It’s the same with the poems, only the poems may go through forty or fifty drafts. Donald Hall told me he sometimes writes a hundred or so drafts of his poems. Can you imagine?

Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

I think that I lost some readers at various points. It was just a natural process of attrition, that’s all. People go on, they find other things. Though I also think that I have changed as a writer over the years, in the sense that I’m not providing exactly the same level of escape that ’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, or even The Stand does. There are people out there who would have been perfectly happy had I died in 1978, the people who come to me and say, Oh, you never wrote a book as good as The Stand. I usually tell them how depressing it is to hear them say that something you wrote twenty-eight years ago was your best book. Dylan probably hears the same thing about Blonde on Blonde. But you try to grow as a writer and not just do the same thing over and over again, because there’s absolutely no point to that.

I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

[Thought I already had this bookmarked. Some good ideas]

> I have strong opinions about what works well on Twitter, and what doesn’t. I decided I would start writing down these opinions so that I can easily reference them in the future. This advice is as much a memorandum to myself as to any readers who might feel that I am preaching to them. I violate most of these recommendations on a regular basis, but I hope that writing this guide helps me to do so less often.

I used to love to write. As a child I used to write all the time. I loved to write up until the second I got my first professional writing job. It turns out it’s not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly slothful. Practically inert. I have no energy. I never have. I just have no desire to be productive. Now that I realize I don’t hate to write, that I just hate to work, it makes writing easier.

Say what you will about his cockiness. With the heavy weight of lit-er-ah-ture on his shoulders, the man delivered the greatest all-American novel since... since... well, you get the idea. Chuck Klosterman talks branding, ex-wives, and rock 'n' roll with the Updike of our time

In the gap between Reality A and Reality B, in the inversion of realities, how far could we preserve our given values, and, at the same time, to what kind of new morals could we go on to give birth? This is one of the themes of the work. I spent three years writing this story, during which time I passed its hypothetical world through myself as a simulation. The chaos is still there — in full measure.

You've heard that this is a book about boredom, and the potential for transcendence that exists beyond the featureless horizon of boredom's endless Midwestern field. That if we fight our instincts to distract ourselves from the reality of our adult lives, which are not by nature "fun," and instead pay complete and focused attention to that reality, boredom might reveal to the most focused of us a kind of heaven, a constant atomic bliss.

60 years of interviews with noted writers.

Can a novelist write philosophically? Even those novelists most commonly deemed “philosophical” have sometimes answered with an emphatic no.

OPML, which stands for Outline Processor Markup Language, is an XML format for outlines. Over the past few years, it has become the digital intermediary for getting your planning and outlining ideas from one app to another. Currently, it is enjoying wide adoption from Mac and iOS developers, which makes it particularly useful to writers and others who prefer to sort out those jumbled ideas knocking about in their brains.

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

But learning to master writing is more than the matter of learning to use the right tools. From where I sit — and I often sit in front of a keyboard and monitor — writing is its own reward. As I have learned from writing my own books, it is far too rewarding to let fear of it deprive you from enjoying it.

Serious criticism on the writer began “in a more democratic vein” than the study of Pynchon and other precursors, Kelly wrote. He pointed out that in Wallace’s case, the kind of close reading of the author’s texts, “traditionally the preserve of academic engagement, has in great part been carried out by skillful and committed nonprofessional readers, who publish their findings in the public domain of the Web.”

It is undeniably true that many -- most? -- professional writers do only use Word, and it may well be true that my grouchy invented straw man does indeed only need Word and an idea, but does that make it an unbreakable rule? More importantly, does it follow, as is so often the implication, that a work written in software intended to make the writing process a little easier is therefore somehow worth less?

No matter how long I work as a journalist, I remain a total sucker for books that purport to teach you how to be a writer. Apparently, I believe I’m going to discover the killer secret — the brilliant time-management technique, the perfect piece of writing software, the exact brand of lever-arch file — that will destroy my procrastination and insecurities forever. There’s a problem, though, with books called things like How To Be An Amazingly Successful And Critically Acclaimed Writer In Ten Easy Steps: almost without exception, they’re written by people you’ve never heard of — people who don’t appear to have achieved much commercial or critical success at all. Perhaps you can spot the contradiction here?

Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.

The Wallace archive at the Harry Ransom Center efficiently dispels the "genius" status awarded to the writer, not because his writing isn't singularly and bewilderingly excellent (it is, even in draft form), but because it presents him as a human being, one of us. Declarations that Wallace is in some other "time-space continuum" are unhelpful because he worked so hard to depict what it means to be a human being in this world, in an age lacking sincerity, but saturated with ironic posturing.

Much like what classical rhetoricians believed about eloquence, Fish argues you can teach students to write by teaching them to pour their ideas into the molds of well-formed sentences.

Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.

Although we recently took a look at some major players in the word-processing world and marveled at their fancy features, if you’re into having a minimalistic work environment and making the best of what you’ve already got, then it will interest you to know that TextEdit, OSX’s native text editing application, is a lot more powerful than you might have given it credit for.

Word Counter is a Macintosh OS X application that performs a word count and a character count, but it can do much more. It can be used independently or in conjunction with other applications such as TextEdit, Microsoft Word, Pages, TextWrangler, and others.

A short story about recession, attraction and data visualisation.

After getting the kinks ironed out of my workflow, I wanted to have the ability to simply drag a MultiMarkdown formatted text document to a Mac OS X application, and have it spit out a formatted document.

Author, publisher and literary trendsetter: Dave Eggers is all those, and he's fast becoming the conscience of liberal America too. Here he tells how he went from 'staggering genius' to the man who gives a voice to the downtrodden and dispossessed

However, the first several years of [Woody Allen's] career are rarely discussed. It is a fascinating period. Comedy devotees swear by the recordings of his stand-up act. At the time of his 1963 debut comedy record, Woody was a smart up-and-comer who'd already logged ten years in the business. But he was far from the personality we think of today.

This last one was the 100th episode of the show, and it went through some pretty serious revisions from pitch to final draft. This is a transcription of a conversation about that specific episode, edited for length and clarity. Also included are the original Story Pitch, Final Outline and First Draft from the writing process (which you can find explained in detail here).