Latest Blog Posts

Times Review for Finding Chandra

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010 at 7:36 am

Good reviews are always nice, but the most gratifying reviews not only praise, but make it clear that a professional reader has found in your work exactly what you had worked so hard to put in to it. That’s what this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review does for Scott Higham’s and Sari Horwitz’s “Finding [...]

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Foreign Correspondent’s Disease

Thursday, May 13th, 2010 at 9:39 am

So a reporter is interviewing a Thai general, who is shot right before his eyes, and THIS is what he writes? Back in the day, we coined a word for this bizarre phenomenon, when a reporter who personally experienced some dramatic, even traumatic event, proceeds to write his story as if he were piecing [...]

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Finding Finding Chandra

Saturday, May 8th, 2010 at 1:27 pm

Story Surgeons’ first editing project to hit the book shelves is now out: Finding Chandra, by Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz , has already garnered some excellent early reviews, and it’s about to get a good dose of national attention. Serialized in The Washington Post already, the book on the strange and terrible saga of [...]

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The Conflict that Keeps on Conflicting

Monday, May 3rd, 2010 at 9:28 am

It’s a well-known writerly fact that the prime driver of reader interest is conflict. My college writing professor always used to say that if you wrote about an old man who needed absolutely nothing more than a porch and a sturdy rocking chair, everyone was bored. But if the only thing that old man really [...]

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Second Time Charm

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 11:54 am

When I turned 56 last week, I was flooded with various age-related speculations. For instance– and I gave this concept to Weingarten for one of his columns recently (oh the selflessness of editing) — the day I was born, I was closer to the 19th Century than I was to the present day.
Awesome as it [...]

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A Two-Timing Guy

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at 4:45 pm

Yesterday Gene Weingarten won his second Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, which, according to no less an eminence than Joel Achenbach, is the first time anyone has repeated in that category. As Joel recounts, the story behind the winning story began on the morning I read about the unimaginable horror of a local man who [...]

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Is there any excuse for this sentence?

Friday, March 26th, 2010 at 12:35 pm

There’s a blog I love,  because I am a secret science geek. Ever since Wednesdays in first grade, when they would cancel science hour if I was absent, I have had a passion for talking and reading about science. High school chemistry cured me of any chance that I would actually become a scientist — [...]

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“perfection in everything”

Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 1:50 pm

Sometimes I read something that strikes me with such force, I wonder if others respond to it with the same intensity, or even anything approaching it. Usually it is a passage that delivers a powerful shock of recognition, as if the author has swept aside a curtain and there, with stark clarity, are your own [...]

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Told You So

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 4:45 pm

I don’t like to say I told you so, but I really, really want to.
I likened the writers of Lost to con men or derivative traders who “are shamelessly abusing their viewers’ trust. They rack up the profits from bizarre and outrageous  turns in character and plot without any intention of ever repaying the emotional [...]

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Lost in the B.S.

Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 5:34 pm

Watching Heroes the other night, I realized I was suffering from plot whiplash.
Heroes is just one more nail in the coffin of the implied compact between storytellers and their audience. Maybe it all began back with Twin Peaks. It has certainly flowered in Lost. But some time, somewhere, smart script writers figured out how to [...]

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