Writing resources

This post exists mostly as a resource for me later on.

Comment from Amazon reviewer concerning On Writing Well:

1) The things that come to the writer easiest -- cliché, excessive detail, syrupy and vague language -- are the things that keep the reader bored/detached/passive.
2) Your main task as a writer is to distill the essence of whatever you're writing about--to find its central idea, to describe its distinctive qualities using precise images. In other words, your main task is to work excruciatingly hard.

Atlantic article distinguishing two approaches to the craft of writing: pre-determination of a novel versus letting "a character show the way" through the story.

New Yorker article describing the structure of writing:

The approach to structure in factual writing is like returning from a grocery store with materials you intend to cook for dinner. You set them out on the kitchen counter, and what’s there is what you deal with, and all you deal with. If something is red and globular, you don’t call it a tomato if it’s a bell pepper. To some extent, the structure of a composition dictates itself, and to some extent it does not. Where you have a free hand, you can make interesting choices.

And the nature of those choices determines your quality and style.

Toe the party line, or else!

So Dick Metcalf, a dude who makes his living reviewing firearms and writing pieces for gun magazines has suddenly become anathema to gun nuts everywhere. How? He dared to use the word "regulation" in a way that wasn't an accusation. He points out the obvious: that the 2nd Amendment itself says, "A well regulated militia..." He points out more obvious (something I literally learned and understood in middle school civics): that all of our rights are regulated by some extent -- that individual liberty ends when public safety / welfare begins to conflict with it.

And so those of us who have always understood that gun rights can and must be regulated, and that the argument is about specifics, not if...well, we belong in what's called "the reality-based community," while people who literally are single-issue gun rights voters (i.e., nutbags) are not.

The Angel of Death

...has a face that looks a lot more like a malignant neoplasm than a heart attack.

That's the bottom line from this article at the NYT. The top causes of death are rapidly changing even as we lower the overall mortality rate. Cancer is on the verge of overtaking heart disease. Of course each country and culture will have slightly varying percentages.

As the author astutely points out, cancer is much more complex to "cure" than many other death risk factors. Our cellular machinery has an inbuilt capacity to regenerate tissue and that will always leave the door open for malfunction.