Be Your Own Editor

As I’ve preached before, anyone who wants to be a successful writer in the days of e-everything should be web-savvy. And if you’re web-savvy, you probably know what a podcast is. If not, you should be spending more time online, both creating your own online presence and taking advantage of the many creative writing websites and, yes, podcasts out there to advise you on both writing and the book business.

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It may seem like ridiculously obvious advice, but it’s one of those bits of ridiculously obvious advice that bears repeating over and over again: In order to be a great, or even good, writer, you have to read. Read a lot. And read good writing. In Francine Prose’s recent bestseller Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, she suggests going a step further and reading in a more careful, thoughtful way. After all, what good is recognizing that Virginia Woolf wrote beautifully complex sentences if you don’t understand how she pulled them off?

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In a surprise move, positivity queen Oprah Winfrey has chosen my favorite book of last year, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, as her newest book club pick. (It’s a surprise because the post-apocalyptic tale isn’t exactly bursting with positive messages.) I’ll definitely be recording her show on the day the notoriously reclusive McCarthy sits down with the big O. You can read some of my thoughts on the book here.

Today’s New York Times features a book called How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by a French literature professor. I have got to get a copy when the translation publishes in the States. Finally, I can pretend I’ve read Proust! And Bright Lights, Big City! Read the article here.

A lot of famous and infamous books have been published over the centuries, and we all have our embarrassing gaps. Share your own here, and I’ll share my thoughts on them. Be honest. We do not judge. And I or someone else might even tell you the book you’ve been “meaning to read” since you were sixteen ain’t worth ten hours of your life.

A recent perusal of the magazine section at Barnes & Noble told me what I already suspected: the pickings of useful magazines for writers (that’s writers, not readers) are slim indeed. I bought all four, and sat down to peruse Writers’ Journal first. My conclusion? While the magazine contains some too-vague advice and off-topic filler, it peppers its pages with enough useful tips to make it worth the $19.97 annual subscription fee for six issues—but only if you’re a novice writer.

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A few weeks ago, I posted a list of the most acclaimed novels of 2006. At the top of the list was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a post-apocalyptic tale of a father desperately trying to save his son’s faith, sense of humanity, and life in a world without much of any of that left. Think Mad Max meets To Kill a Mockingbird. Wait, scratch that. Bad idea. Just read The Road—carefully—and learn how deceptively simple writing can evoke bottomless depths of character and meaning.

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