101 Best Websites For Writers

Writer's Digest has been the bible of freelance writing for a long time. I started reading it in college, and I devoured every article in every issue. I also sent away for some of the books put out by their publishing company, and I thought they were useful, to varying degrees.

Art Spikol, an ex-boss of mine, wrote a column for Writer's Digest for years. Art's column, like the magazine, was full of practical advice for freelance writers.

I don't subscribe to the Writer's Digest magazine anymore, but I do visit their Web site. And this particular page, The 101 Best Websites For Writers, is one I have bookmarked. It's got some very useful resources in categories like Agents, Jobs & Markets, Writing Communities, and Fun for Writers (every writer needs to have some fun!). It's worth checking out this site.

100 Best First Lines of Novels

The editors of the American Book Review have published a list of what they say are the 100 Best First Lines of Novels. I love first lines of novels almost as much as I love first lines of short stories. The first line of a good short story hits you like a slap across the face, and then pulls you along to the conclusion. The novel is a longer form, of course, and the first line is more like an invitation to enter the world of the novel, something that piques your interest enough to make you want to spend some time in this new world.

The list from American Book Review has some classic first lines in it, and some that left me baffled. Some of the first lines are as long as a short story, and that's not my personal taste. I like the short ones, like "Call me Ishmael". Now, that's a great first line!

Writing The Old-Fashioned Way

I heard crime novelist James Ellroy interviewed on NPR this morning, and he said he doesn't own a cell phone or computer, and he's never been on the Internet. Plus, he does all his writing in longhand. He's not the first fiction writer I've heard of who spurns technology. Elmore Leonard, a pretty successful novelist himself, writes his novels in longhand. And William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, the first great cyberpunk novel, claimed for years that he didn't own a computer and even when he did finally get one, he didn't use the Internet.

Is this possible? Isn't every writer obligated to be plugged in these days? How can you write whole novels in longhand, with that most ancient of writing instruments, the pencil? Isn't that a really slow way of writing?

Well, yes. But it's actually a very satisfying one. When you write with a pencil, you have to slow your thoughts down to the pace of the scratching of the pencil on paper. It allows you to examine each individual thought, hold it up to the light and see what it's really made of. You're not in this mad rush to get your thoughts on the computer screen, your fingers flying across the keyboard almost faster than your mind can think.

And writing, good writing, is all about thinking. Gibson once said in an interview that he composed much of his first novel while sitting in a rocking chair looking out a window at his house. He worked it all out in his mind first, then wrote it down. Maybe that's why his vision of the future, written in the early 1980s, has been so eerily prescient. Gibson predicted networked computers, the Internet, virtual reality, and many other technological innovations that have since come true. He took a look around at his world and then thought deeply about it, and came up with a vision of the future that has been amazingly true.

I remember reading a story about the novelist John O'Hara, where late in his career he went on a vacation to Bermuda. He wanted to get away from writing, so he didn't bring his typewriter, or even a notepad. However, he got an idea for a short story, and it wouldn't leave him. He began to work it out in his mind while at the beach, and on the last day of his vacation he asked the hotel he was staying at if they could provide him with a typewriter. When he got the typewriter he sat down and wrote the story, word for word, from the mental work he had done all week. He typed rapidly, as if he was just taking dictation, and when he was finished he didn't change a word. He had written and edited it in his head, and there was no need to change a thing. It was published shortly thereafter.

A well-trained mind is still a writer's best tool. It beats a computer any day.

Sleepy Thoughts

I’m going to sleep like a baby tonight.

That’s because today I got my CPAP machine. CPAP stands for “continuous positive airway pressure”, and this little machine helps people like me with sleep apnea. What it does is pump a stream of air up my nose, so that I don’t have to wake up many times a night like a fish gasping for air on a boat deck.

I was tested for sleep apnea, and the good doctors at my local sleep center hooked me up to an array of monitors and other equipment that showed I was waking up on average 45 times an hour because I couldn’t get my breath. Apnea occurs because of muscle tissue that relaxes and blocks the airway during sleep. This interrupted breathing can occur many times a night, and in effect a sleep apnea sufferer is waking up all night long, gasping for air. You’re not conscious of most of these episodes, but they’re still disturbing your sleep patterns.

And you can’t wake up all night long without paying for it the next day. Sleep apnea sufferers are chronically tired, even fatigued. When I was diagnosed recently, it made me realize that I’ve been feeling tired for years now, and there are many times during the day when I get sleepy sitting at my desk.

On top of that, I wonder if it’s affected my mental sharpness. Have you ever read about those studies where people are kept awake for 24 or more hours, and tested periodically to see how the lack of sleep is affecting them? The first things to go are your creativity and your higher mental function. Miss a night’s sleep and you’ll have a harder time doing algebra problems or writing a coherent essay. When I think of all the disturbed sleep I’ve had over the last 10 years, it makes me wonder if I could have written the Great American Novel by now if not for that danged apnea.

Well, we’ll see -- if I have a sudden burst of creativity and write three novels, a collection of poems, and a screenplay in the next year, it’ll be due to the fact that I’m finally getting a good night’s sleep.

10 Ugly Truths About Modern (American) Journalism

Some of these points are hardly new or earth-shattering, but 10 Ugly Truths About Modern (American) Journalism is worth reading to see how journalism has changed, much of it due to the Internet.

13 Writing Tips

I haven't read anything by Chuck Palahniuk, but he has some good advice here, at 13 Writing Tips.

Lessons From John Updike

Here's an article I wrote when one of my favorite writers, John Updike, passed away this year. I took some lessons from his long and productive career, and offered them to readers. Here it is:

How to Write Like John Updike