Forget what you learned in high school English

Like everybody else, I had plenty of topic-sentence obsessed English teachers and I've had plenty of students who have trouble breaking out of dreary opening beats.

Listen here to "This American Life" genius Ira Glass show how to drop that bad beginning and get to the guts of good story telling.

I found this on Jane Friedman's newsletter. Check it out.

Gotta Love Doing It .. . Writing that is

In Escaping Into the Open: The Art of Writing True, Elizabeth Berg says, "What you have to be is in love. With writing. Not with ideas about what to write; not with daydreams about what you're going to do when you're successful. You have to be in love with writing itself, with the solitary and satisfying act of sitting down and watching something you hold in your head and your heart quietly transform itself into words on a page."
I saw this quote here.

Brand-Building? Just Do It.

In Sunday's Times Book Review, Tony Perrottot discusses all the ways authors have promoted
themselves, for millennia:

In 440 B. C. author Herodotus funded his own Aegean book tour.

In 1887, Guy de Maupassant launched a hot-air balloon with his latest short story title emblazoned on the side.

Hemingway made Ballantine Ale ads in 1951.

And so on. Feel no shame. Just get out there, like my press agent--pictured here.