My favorite line from Sunday's New York Times Book Review was Joe Klein's on Ben Rhodes: "He writes well, even though he has a master's degree in creative writing, and he has a good eye."
I'm off for a few days so I leave you with this essay on writing, possibly the first to contain a Polish saying and a baseball analogy:
https://lithub.com/after-dozens-of-rejections-it-only-takes-one-acceptance-to-make-a-writer/
Yesterday I went to see the Marlins play the Nationals at the Nationals’ spring training facility in West Palm Beach. It was a low-scoring game and at one point, watching a Marlin trudge back to the dugout after striking out, I wondered how I would feel if, after receiving a rejection, my office filled with the sounds of “Hit the Road Jack.”
One of the pleasures of writing a book is making a joke that you unwittingly set up fifty pages earlier.
During student introductions last night one young woman said that she was from France, here in Miami on vacation. And I thought: What a perfect way to spend one's vacation, by taking a travel writing course.
I was encouraged by the news that a number of people with enormous followings on social media were found to have purchased many of their followers. Though I wonder if it will change any professional behaviors. It has become a common practice for editors and agents to check writers’ followings before taking on their manuscripts, platform now being as important to the world of publishing as talent (if not more so). It would remind me of high school, where popularity is paramount, but even there the student voted the Most Popular was never the one Most Likely to Succeed.