blogging

13 Books That Will Help You Be a Better Writer and Storyteller

My favorite book is always the one I’m reading now. I get vested in the story, in the characters, in the voice of the writer. The last few pages can feel like a kind of death (a sense of foreboding, a final ending), which is why I often sequentially, and (sometimes) obsessively, read the works of a writer I like. Ten years ago I read Me Talk Pretty One Day, and that year I read so much David Sedaris that I’d observe something—say, a man in a Santa suit waiting in line for a sandwich—and I’d think, “David would love this.” So when I tried to choose my top recommendations among the books I’ve read that will make you a better writer… well, it was agony. I had to exclude more than I could include. But, eventually, I compiled a list of my top recommendations. They aren’t necessarily my all-time

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How to Get Regular Updates of Annarchy

Since I don’t write here daily, it’s easy to miss new stuff on this blog. My friend Chris Brogan, guest-posting at Shannon Paul’s place, calls the content I create here a “craft blog” and distinguishes it from a typical blog that’s updated more frequently, with shorter posts. Understandably, Chris says, my essays here are “something you wouldn’t want to rush.” The downside of that is that I post irregularly. So here are some ways to get my new blog posts sent to you automatically.

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I Suspect Everyone Else Is Smarter, Better-Looking, Taller, Cooler, Cuter, Has Newer and Shinier Objects than I Do (and Is More Modest)

When you are prone to measuring yourself against others, like I am, and when you both work and live out chunks of your life online, as I do, the Internet can be a bitch. It’s easy to get caught up in measuring your impact online, and to suspect that your own self-worth is tied to it. It’s easy, for example, to measure your popularity and self-esteem in terms of the number of “friends” you have on Facebook, the number of followers on Twitter, the extent of your professional contacts on LinkedIn, your cache of Feedburner subscribers, your Web site’s Google PageRank, tags on Flickr, comments, links, visits, clicks, referrals, Karma on Plurk, and—worst of all!—your Technorati degree of “Authority,” which implies a sort of collected clout and power that, for most of us, doesn’t really exist outside of the unblinking screen that is our dashboard to the world. Those of

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How I Invented Blogging

When I was a kid growing up, and my parents’ friends would ask me the inevitable question, “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?” I would look them square in the eye and say definitively, “I want to be a blogger.” Well, that’s not entirely true. I did go through a period, when I was about 8 or 9, of wanting to be a vet, until my mother pointed out the inherent limitations of a veterinarian who accepted appointments only with cute, healthy dogs under a year old. That, and I was rather shy—so I never actually looked an adult square in the eye. Truth be told, I never spoke to them, either. But other than that brief diversion—I always wanted to be a blogger. In fact, I invented blogging. It’s just that it took 25 years for the technology to catch up. So while I

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