Generating Ideas in Advanced Feature Writing
Many believe the hardest part of longform feature writing is generating story ideas that will sell to publications. What is a feature story idea? At its most basic, it identifies something that’s happening in the world (involving a person, an event, a trend, a place, an unfolding situation…) and puts it into perspective for readers. […]
The Gritty Lowdown on Success
I began teaching feature writing in the late 1980s and finally began to notice a pattern about a decade later. Students who were naturals, who could write with tremendous flair seemingly without much effort, didn’t necessarily go on to become great writers. Others who weren’t the obvious literary stars, whose writing could be ponderous, perhaps […]
Always Take Notes
I’ve listened to every one of the more than 300 Longform podcasts, those interviews with nonfiction writers that the Longform site has been running for the past six years. More recently, a British variation, Always Take Notes (Always Take Notes podcast) has materialized. Co-hosts Simon Akam and Eleanor Halls (or Kassia St. Clair) have candid conversations with […]
Meet-&-Greet, MFA in Creative Nonfiction, MON, NOV. 12, 2018
Do you have a book you’ve wanted to write? Does the task seem daunting, there just isn’t enough time? If the answer is yes, or even maybe, come to the meet-and-greet on Monday, November 12 for the University of King’s College MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Here is a link to information about it: Meet-&-Greet, MFA in […]
Superman’s Super-Riter
Unlike my friends, when I was a kid reading Superman comics I remember being most attracted to reporter Clark Kent tapping away at a typewriter that looked not unlike my mother’s Remington No.2 portable, on which I was learning to type. In the “Adventures of Superman” TV series, it was, in fact, the aptly-named Remington […]
Lillian Ross: The Hollywood Reporter
A year ago, Lillian Ross, died at 99. Her reputation as one of the great literary journalists of the twentieth century is established, but not so well-known is the fact that she pioneered the inside-Hollywood expose in the early 1950s, long before such book-length projects were common. I wrote this essay in the excellent online […]
Advanced Feature Writing, Fall 2018
In Advanced Feature Writing, we’ll talk about everything from developing feature story ideas and writing effective query letters to the researching, reporting and interviewing process and writing the feature itself. It’s hand’s on. You’ll be expected to go and see interview subjects in their world, observing them, creating scenes that will drive the story. Then […]
BOOKS THAT MATTER: “Seabiscuit: An American Legend”
I don’t care about horse racing, nor do I have any special affinity for horses, other than admiring the noble animals the way anyone would. But in her work of historical nonfiction, Seabiscuit: An American Legend, Laura Hillenbrand had me from the first sentence: “In 1938 the year’s number-one newsmaker was not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hitler […]
A Grammar Rule to Put Up With
Atlas Obscura is a wonderful online magazine & digital media company founded in 2009 by writer Joshua Foer & filmmaker Dylan Thuras. Filled with wonderful arcana & curiousities, I liked this because it’s a rule imprinted on my mind, making me unable to end a sentence with a preposition unless I was ordered to at […]
Beautiful Joe
Among the classic children’s books my parents read to me (and I later read myself), was Beautiful Joe. It was a fictionalized telling of a true story about a medium-sized mutt (probably part bull terrier and part fox terrier) owned by a farmer in Meaford, ON in the late 1900s who brutally abused him (chopping off […]