Tag Archives | Writing

What I Read: Robert Reid

By on May 14, 2013 in Media

Robert ReidA series that asks travel and food writers about their media consumption and how they structure their writing days, find sources, and deal with information overflow. Inspired by The Atlantic Wire, but with a travel, food, and culture focus.

Robert Reid recently left his job as the U.S. Travel Editor of Lonely Planet “to pursue my own writing and see if I have a book in me.” His work has been featured in the New York Times, World Hum, ESPN, Perceptive Travel, CNN, and BBC.com, among other outlets and Mashable listed him as one of the Top 15 travel folks to follow on Twitter.

How do you get started with your day?

I’m not a very interesting person before 10:30 in the morning. Like most people, I’d guess, I make coffee and check email and flip through Twitter. It gives me pleasure to let the morning be quiet for awhile, just standing and listening to the coffee percolate. If something catches my eye on Twitter, I’ll follow the link. But I’ve learned I don’t need to know as much as I used to.

Continue Reading →

0

The Writing Life: Fantasy vs. Reality

By on May 10, 2013 in Writing

Today, I read the following passage from Emily Magazine and found myself nodding in agreement. How many times have I thought this? How many other writers have thought this, too? At any rate, a wave of melancholy — but also relief — swept over me. Even well-published writers get the blues:

Needless to say — you aren’t reading this in Elle, are you? — I was not lifted up easefully into the realm of the brand-name. Probably because I didn’t do any of the things that I would have had to do in order to get there. I still don’t quite understand what it takes to get there. More and more I think it’s not what I’m good at, or even what I want to be good at.  I still feel jealous of people who get paid well to go on junkets and describe them humorously and vividly, of course. But I want something else, and it does not, for the moment, involve sitting alone in a room with a computer.  It also does, of course.  I have been happiest and most miserable alone in that room.

When I went back to working in an office after years of not, I could suddenly see the particular brand of crazy my former compatriots in freelancing exhibited, revealed in high definition. Their obsessive Facebook status updates, their public declarations about how much or how little they’d written that day or how their writing was going, the kind of super-involved tweeting that you only see in people who are either trapped at desk jobs where there’s too little for them to do or in freelancers desperate to avoid the work they’ve assigned themselves. I have done all of this stuff, of course, but the moment I didn’t have time to do it anymore, I could see it for what it was. It was, initially, a blessed relief to be rendered unable to ride the waves of Schadenfreude and fleeting, irrational enthusiasm that wash over the social Internet all day.  I was also rendered incapable of feeling jealous of everyone whose writing was momentarily elevated by a stream of “THIS!”-style sharing. I had other stuff to do.  I have other stuff to do.

Feels blind [Emily Magazine]

0

The Intimacy of Text and the Evolution of Language

By on May 9, 2013 in Writing

From Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other to tech writer Paul Miller’s experiment of going offline for an entire year, much has been written about how the Internet is potentially warping our brains. So, I found it refreshing to read Helena Fitzgerald’s recent piece in The New Inquiry, which argues that our current primary forms of communication – texting, Gchat, email, Twitter, blogging – are forging (or re-establishing) a new relationship with the written word:

Internet socialization is far closer to a 19th century mode of intimacy than to a dystopian future of tragically disconnected robot prostitutes. There’s a Jane Austen-ish quality to online social life. The written word gains unmatched power and inarguable primacy.

Whether we’re sending long-form letters to one another or chatting face to face with friends, storytelling is key, according to Jag Bhalla writing for Scientific American:

Any story we tell of our species, any science of human nature, that leaves out much of what and how we feel is false. Nature shaped us to be ultra-social, and hence to be sharply attentive to character and plot. We are adapted to physiologically interact with stories.

Finally, Discovery News reports that there are 23 words that may date back 15,000 years. Here’s a hat-tip to David Weinberger, whose link to this article poetically ties together these ancient words with our modern technology:

 

0

%d bloggers like this: