By Jess Walter (an excerpt) 1. The population of Spokane, Washington is 195,526. It is the 105th biggest city in the United States. 2. Even before the recession, in 2008, 34,000 people in Spokane lived below the poverty line—a little more than 17 percent of the population. That’s about the same as it was in…
1) A character must control his or her choices within the movie When I see scripts that aren’t working, it’s often because that character really has no agency. Has no real decision-making capability on what’s going to happen next. Either they’re always responding to what the villain is doing, or what other characters are sort…
Lights are burning In quiet rooms Where lives go on Resembling ours.The quiet lives That follow us — These lives we lead But do not own — Stand in the rain So quietly When we are gone, So quietly… And the last bus Comes letting dark Umbrellas out — Black flowers, black flowers. And lives…
1) On the edifying mission of pre-tourism travel Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment. 2) On the aesthetic compromises of modern travel I don’t want to sound too gloomy, but there’s…
(an excerpt) FIRST GRADE My hair was too short and my U.S. Government glasses were horn-rimmed, ugly, and all that first winter in school, the other Indian boys chased me from one corner of the playground to the other. They pushed me down, buried me in the snow until I couldn’t breathe, thought I’d never…
1) On how quotidian life is like killing zombies Every zombie war is a war of attrition. It’s always a numbers game, and it’s more repetitive than complex. In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting four hundred work emails on a Monday morning, or filling out paperwork that only generates…
1) The letter form is a good way to warm up I’ve found that the letter form is a good way to get me going. I write letters just to warm up. Some of them are just, “Fuck you, I wouldn’t sell that for a thousand dollars,” or something, “Eat shit and die,” and then…
I pick an orange from a wicker basket and place it on the table to represent the sun. Then down at the other end a blue and white marble becomes the earth and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.I get a glass from a cabinet, open a bottle of wine, then I…
(an excerpt) Vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and…
Former Black Flag front-man Henry Rollins has, over the course of his career, achieved notoriety as a punk-rock pioneer and prolific spoken-word performer – but in recent years he’s also become an advocate of slow, humble, close-to-the ground international travel. Though Rollins’ 1994 band-tour memoir Get in the Van contained hints of his shoestring-travel instincts,…
1) When you’re ready to stop, stop For the nonfiction writer, the simplest way of putting this into a rule is: when you’re ready to stop, stop. If you have presented the facts and made the point that you want to make, look for the nearest exit. –William Zinsser, On Writing Well (1976) 2) Your…
