By William Zinsser (an excerpt) Next to knowing how to write about people, you should know how to write about a place. People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like. In a few cases…
Friends and vagabonders, Twenty years to the month after my first international vagabonding journey, I have embarked on another multi-month adventure through Asia. Back in 1999 the journey began in Bangkok, lasted nearly three years, led to my first book Vagabonding, and was largely chronicled in my second book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There. I…
1) Bringing a list of questions isn’t essential When it comes to interviews, I very rarely turn up with a list of questions. Almost never, in fact. If you’ve prepared well, and know something about your subject, the conversation just happens. –Tom Bissell, interviewed in The Rumpus, April 17, 2012 2) Let the person talk…
A woman travels to Brazil for plastic surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty and has the usual desire to stay pretty. Once she is healed, she takes her new face out on the streets of Rio. A young man with a gun wants her money. Bang, she’s dead. The body is shipped back to…
1) On the importance of reading to writing I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns…
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…
