It comes down to this: biography, history, and serious nonfiction take years to research, write, and publish. When books sell to publishers, they do so on proposal, with the expectation that it will take those aforementioned years, if not more, to complete. There are ways to do so with little money, but that generally means the writer needs to be supported by an institution — university, think tank, you name it — or be independently wealthy. Big deal, right? Most writers working in any category are in the same boat. Serious nonfiction is not really a money category, though, but a prestige one. And “prestige” translates even less well to ebook sales. Mosey on over to, say, the Kindle bestseller lists, and how much serious nonfiction do you see there? Caro right now, sure, but that’s because he’s a known entity, a name brand if you will. And he’s working off contracts that are years old and equity that dates back more than 40 years, in a manner of speaking. And last fall, Walter Isaacson and his Steve Jobs bio, but then, Jobs was newly dead. Otherwise, not so much as compared to commercial fiction, romance, mystery, self-help, politics/current affairs, etc.

Anyone can learn how to land a spacecraft on a rocky asteroid flying through space at twelve miles per second. I don’t need some pencilneck with four Ph.D’s, one-thousand hours of simulator time, and the ability to operate a robot crane in low-Earth orbit. I need someone with four years of broad-but-humanities-focused studies, three subsequent years in temp jobs, and the ability to reason across multiple areas of study.

It’s not writing that takes Caro so long but, rather, rewriting. In college he was such a quick and facile writer, and so speedy a typist, that one of his teachers, the critic R. P. Blackmur, once told him that he would never achieve anything until he learned to “stop thinking with his fingers,” and Caro actually tries to slow himself down these days. He doesn’t start typing — on an old Smith Corona Electra 210, not a computer — until he has finished four or five handwritten drafts. And then he rewrites the typescript. When I visited him one day in early December, he was correcting the page proofs of “The Passage of Power” the way Proust used to correct proofs: scratching out, writing in between the lines, pasting in additional sheets of inserts.

Caro is an equally obsessive researcher. Gott­lieb likes to point to a passage fairly early in “The Power Broker” describing Moses’ parents one morning in their lodge at Camp Madison, a fresh-air charity they established for poor city kids, picking up The Times and reading that their son had been fined $22,000 for improprieties in a land takeover. “Oh, he never earned a dollar in his life, and now we’ll have to pay this,” Bella Moses says.

“How do you know that?” Gottlieb asked Caro. Caro explained that he tried to talk to all of the social workers who had worked at Camp Madison, and in the process he found one who had delivered the Moseses’ paper. “It was as if I had asked him, ‘How do you know it’s raining out?’ ” Gottlieb told me, and he added: “When ‘The Power Broker’ came out, other writers were amazed. No one had ever seen anything like it. It was a monument not to industry, because lots of people have industry, but to something else. I don’t even know what to call it.”

Caro once spent several nights alone in a sleeping bag in the Texas Hill Country so he could understand what rural isolation felt like there. For the Johnson books, he has conducted thousands of interviews, many with Johnson’s friends and contemporaries. (Lady Bird spoke to him several times and then abruptly stopped without giving a reason, and Bill Moyers, Johnson’s press secretary, has never consented to be interviewed, but most of Johnson’s closest cronies, including John Connally and George Christian, Johnson’s last press secretary, who spoke to Caro practically on his deathbed, have gone on the record.) He has spent literally several years at the Johnson Library, in Austin, Tex., painstakingly going through the red buckram boxes that contain Johnson’s papers, and he has been the first researcher to open some of the most revealing files there. “Over and over again, I’ve found crucial things that nobody knew about,” he said. “There’s always original stuff if you look hard enough.” He added that he tried to keep in mind something that his managing editor at Newsday, Alan Hathway, a crusty old newspaper­man once told him, after pointing out that Caro was the only Ivy Leaguer who ever amounted to anything: “Turn every goddamn page.”

Then along comes Instagram. Instagram has as many employees as you can count on your fingers (if you have polydactyly) and does a sum total of one thing. It’s beloved and hip, two things Facebook is not, and plus the company is pure nerd candy. It uses open-source software named after a jazz musician (Django!); uses the language Python, which is as beloved as PHP is loathed; and posts about its technical exploits over on Tumblr (which, fun fact, recently announced its 20 billionth blog post — on Twitter). Instagram does everything "right," for a value of right that matters to nerds, and it does it with one product. When it needs to add a million users in a day — as it did with the release of its application for Android — it just brings up a ton of fresh web servers and keeps on trucking. And that's how stuff goes now, in the cloud. If you need a thousand web servers tomorrow I can get them for you, no problem.

Remember what the iPod was to Apple? That’s how Instagram might look to Facebook: an artfully designed product that does one thing perfectly. Sure, you might say, but Instagram doesn’t have any revenue. Have you ever run an ad on Facebook? The ad manager is a revelation — as perfectly organized and tidy as the rest of Facebook is sprawling and messy. Spend $50 and try to sell something — there it is, UX at its most organized and majestic, a key to all of the other products at once.

I love Django’s documentation. It clocks in at about 700 pages printed, and most of it is clear, concise, and helpful. I think Django’s among the best documented open source projects, and nothing makes me prouder.

If any part of Django endures, I hope it’ll be a sort of “documentation culture” — an ethos that values great, well-written documentation. To that end, I’m writing a series of articles laying out the tools, tips, and techniques I’ve learned over the years I’ve spent helping to write Django’s docs.

This advice will mostly be targeted towards those documenting libraries or frameworks intended for use by other developers, but much of it probably applies to any for of technical documentation.

t was dandy with him, too. The Hardy Boys were to be a brief, inconsequential meal ticket. They would take a few days apiece; he would expend no intellectual energy on them, and he would use the pay to underwrite more serious work. He would launch a family and a writing career, and in time be recognized as a man of letters.

Briefly, things went swell. And then came 1929. A bad time to be a writer without a steady paycheck.

"We had no car. We had no coal. My mother always had food on the table, but sometimes it was spaghetti with tomato juice on it."

This is Brian McFarlane, Leslie McFarlane's son. Brian McFarlane would grow up to be a hockey player, and later, a sports broadcaster and prolific writer of books about hockey. He is a member of the Canadian Hockey Hall of Fame.

In his father's diary there is an entry from the early 1930s. He took baby Brian for a walk, but had to return. Brian's only shoes had fallen apart. Another entry: He had to mail out a manuscript, but he had no money, so he borrowed 10 cents from Brian's piggy bank.

Another entry: "We are hoping for some money in time to go to the dance Friday night. It is humiliating to be so hard up."

McFarlane was writing good fiction, but few places were buying. He had only one steady patron, a syndicate that was paying him peanuts to write according to a formula it supplied.

There were children's books at the time written with eloquence -- Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie," for example -- but the Stratemeyer editors weren't interested in that, certainly not willing to pay enough to achieve it. They wanted simple and dumb.

In the early volumes, McFarlane gamely tried invention. As a foil for the ingenious Hardy Boys, he created two stumblebum local police officers, Chief Collig and Deputy Smuff, who dithered and blundered and misinterpreted clue after clue. It was a technique used by detective writers from Conan Doyle to Christie. But the Stratemeyer Syndicate was not amused. This was fostering a disrespect for authority, it said. McFarlane was ordered, in subsequent volumes, to give the cops a brain.

The message was clear. These were not McFarlane's books. They belonged to men named Edward Stratemeyer, who wanted bilge, and Franklin W. Dixon, who did not exist.

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

Here's how it works, with me and with most writers I know (because I've asked). I've used computers for more than 25 years. I draft prose on-screen, work it over until I can't find much wrong with it, then double-space it and print it out. At that point I discover what's really there, which is ordinarily hazy, bloated, and boring. It looked pretty good on-screen, but it's crap. My first drafts on paper, after what amount to several drafts on computer, look like a battlefield.

As readers will discover, the man who is now America's top-ranking professional diplomat, William Burns, contributed from Russia a highly entertaining account – almost worthy of Evelyn Waugh – of a wild Dagestani wedding attended by the gangsterish president of Chechnya, who danced clumsily "with his gold-plated automatic stuck down the back of his jeans".

"Now, his address and his phone number are in the Rolodex on your desk," Phyllis explained. "People are going to call and ask for his number. You think it won't happen, but it will." She paused to light another cigarette. "Grad students. Reporters. Just … people. They may try to trick you or manipulate you. They may give you some song-and-dance routine." She laughed a throaty laugh, then fixed me sharply in her pale blue eyes. "But you can never, ever give out that address. Or that phone number. NEVER. OK?" I nodded and gave her my most professional smile. "Because it's happened before," she told me. "I've had assistants who just don't understand."

Legendary headlines from years past (some of which verge on the mythical) include “Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,” “MacArthur Flies Back to Front” and “Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.” The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of ambiguous headlinese in the 1980s, with the classic titles “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim” and “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge.”

For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.)

Charles Dickens left behind one, and only one, manuscript for “A Christmas Carol,” the tale he wrote in 1843 of an unfeeling rich man and the boy who pricked his conscience. Kept under lock-and-key for much of the year at the Morgan Library and Museum, the manuscript is not widely available, one reason, perhaps, why it has been all but impossible to track the many revisions Dickens made to the manuscript as he struggled to get his story right. A high-resolution copy of the manuscript's 66 pages, which you can examine below, may finally change that.

for intentional organization

My name is Matthew Butterick. I’m an attorney in Los Angeles. I run a law office, Butterick Law Corporation, where I do civil litigation.

But before I had the idea to become an attorney, I got a degree in art from Harvard University, focusing on graphic design and typography. After college, I worked as a digital typeface designer. Then I started and ran a website development studio.

Even though the legal profession depends heavily on writing, legal typography is often poor. Some blame lies with the strict typographic constraints that control certain legal documents (e.g. court rules regarding the format of pleadings).

Jobs and recruiting for media professionals in journalism, on-line content, book publishing, TV, radio, PR, graphic design, photography, and advertising

The Burnside Writers Collective is an online magazine for followers of Jesus who are looking for a connections with the world outside of franchise Christianity.

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.

...

ENG: 232WR—Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll
LIT: 223—Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less
ENG: 102—Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking
ENG: 301—Advanced Blog and Book Skimming
ENG: 231WR—Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance
LIT: 202—The Literary Merits of Lolcats
LIT: 209—Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption

ha ha, this is fun

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers. People who take creative-writing workshops get course credit and can, ultimately, receive an academic degree in the subject; but a workshop is not a course in the normal sense—a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script. The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart.

“The assumptions of realism as it has been practised are simply wrong. People bring a great deal of memory and also a sense of present experience to everything that they do. If you see someone doing a simple action like hanging sheets on a line, there is absolutely no reason in that person’s perception that there is anything simple about it at all. I have all the respect in the world for reality, but I think the general assumptions about it are wrong.”

Pullum should know, of course: he’s the author of this big fat book, which having read this essay I’d gladly assign to my intro students in place of Strunk & White if not for the fact that it costs over $160 and runs to nearly 2,000 pages long. (Anyone have some alternative suggestions?) It’s hard, though, not to feel like his criticism sometimes goes a bit beyond its proper bounds, as for example when he seems to blame MS Word’s nasty habit of underlining EVERY SINGLE PASSIVE-VOICE CONSTRUCTION in one of those bothersome green lines on our national love-affair with the Elements (“That overinterpretation is part of the damage that Strunk and White have unintentionally done.”); this may be accurate for all I know, but I’d need to see a bit more evidence.

But the one constant for the past four books has been an ingenious piece of software called Devonthink, which is basically a free-form database that accepts many different document types (PDFs, text snippets, web pages, images, etc). It has a very elegant semantic algorithm that can detect relationships between short excerpts of text, so you can use the software as a kind of connection machine, a supplement to your own memory. I wrote about this several years ago for the Times Book Review, and I still get emails from people every couple of weeks asking about the software. (The Devonthink guys should put me in an infomercial.)

Welcome to Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, a word-a-day dictionary from Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed by W. Strahan for J. and P. Knapton, [1755]), one of the first dictionaries to document the daily working life of the English language.

In celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of Johnson’s birth in 1709, a definition from the first edition of the dictionary will be posted each day for readers’ lexiconic delight, beginning on January 1, 2009. Words will be taken from the annotated proof copy of the first edition, extra-illustrated with Johnson’s and his helpers’ manuscript corrections, which is held in the collections of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Practical writing tips, plus an angle on academe I've somehow hardly considered. Where's the contemplation? At the monastery, I guess.

Here's the situation. You're working on a big writing project-a proposal, paper, book, dissertation, whatever-and in the last five weeks all you've managed to get done is one measly paragraph. You're long past the date when the project was supposed to be finished, and you just looked at your to-do list and reminded yourself that this is only one of several writing projects on your plate and you haven't even started most of the others.

SALMAGUNDI is a quarterly of the Humanities and Social Sciences which is addressed to the “general” reader rather than to the academic specialist. Founded in 1965 and published since 1969 at Skidmore College, the magazine routinely publishes essays, reviews, interviews, fiction, poetry, regular columns, polemics, debates and symposia. It is widely regarded as one of the most influential intellectual quarterlies in the United States, and though it is often discussed as a “little magazine,” it is by no means predominantly belletristic or narrow in its purview or its audience.

Sometimes I daydream of having rejection slips made up for all sorts of things in life, like for moments when I sense a silly argument brewing with my lovely and mysterious spouse, and instead of foolishly trying to lay out my sensible points which have been skewed or miscommunicated, I simply hold up a card (BRIAN DOYLE REGRETS THAT HE IS UNABLE TO PURSUE THIS MATTER), or for when my children ask me to drive them half a block to the park (GET A GRIP), or when I am invited to a meeting at work I know will drone and moan for hours (I WOULD PREFER TO HAVE MY SPLEEN REMOVED WITH A BUTTER KNIFE), or for overpious sermons (GET A GRIP!), for oleaginous politicians and other mountebanks (IF YOU TELL ONE MORE LIE I WILL COME UP THERE AND PUMMEL YOU WITH A MAMMAL), etc.

On a Japanese cell phone, you type the syllables of hiragana and katakana, and the phone suggests kanji from a list of words you use most frequently. Unlike working in longhand, which requires that an author know the complex strokes for several thousand kanji, and execute them well, writing on a cell phone lowers the barrier for a would-be novelist. The novels are correspondingly easy to read—most would pose no challenge to a ten-year-old—with short lines, simple words, and a repetitive vocabulary. Much of the writing is hiragana, and there is ample blank space to give the eyes a rest. “You’re not trying to pack the screen,” a cell-phone novelist named Rin told me. (Her name, as it happens, actually was borrowed from a dog: her best friend’s Chihuahua.) “You’re changing the line in the middle of sentences, so where you cut the sentence is an essential part. If you’ve got a very quiet scene, you use a lot more of those returns and spaces. ...”

Unfortunately, many Christians have allowed themselves to become so estranged from contemporary culture that they have essentially given up any hope of influencing the artists who will create the visual images, stories, and music that shape our time.

Few Christians have applied the concept of "stewardship" to culture itself. While it has been natural for Christians to see themselves as stewards of natural resources, or wealth, or the institutional church, there has been little sense of stewardship over our national culture.

Image speaks with equal force and relevance to the secular culture and to the church. By finding fresh ways for the imagination to embody religious truth and religious experience, Image challenges believers and nonbelievers alike.

Chalk this up, if you will, to deficiencies in my Christian character. But even for those more saintly than myself— and there are a few—the blogosphere inevitably accelerates the pace of debate to the timetable of daily journalism. In terms of how they treat substantive ideas, blogs are not very different from newspapers: they present an idea and then move on, as quickly as possible, to the next idea. Perhaps there can be, later on, some brief acknowledgment that that idea wasn't treated fully and adequately—but, as the newsreel in Citizen Kane reminds us, Time is On The March, and bloggers are under enormous pressure to march along with it.