Chris Jones says

Not All Smurfs and Sunshine

Fatal distraction, annotated

Fatal Distraction

On copying

What other writers can teach us, Imitation, reverberation and inspiration

Reading for next class

The Things That Carried Him

Fatal Distraction

And the Pulitzer goes to ....

The Pulitzer Prizes, journalism's top honor, were announced yesterday. A full list is here, with links to the winning entries. And you might notice something, too:

Say what?

There was plenty of shock about this.

This isn't the first time this has happened. No award was given in this category back in 2004.

Many theories, but I think it comes down to how subjective good feature writing is. Other categories don't rely so heavily on just a good story -- remember the laws of importance and the laws of interesting? Well, feature writing basically rests on "law of interesting" alone, while the others all benefit from having some kind of importance attached to them. And folks can more readily agree on what's important rather than interesting. NSA secrets? Important. Abuses by big corporations? Important.

Supporting this idea is that the Pulitzer for fiction (yes, they do arts and letters, too) has not gone to any work seven times over the years. And again, fiction is a pretty subjective field.

A place to send your personal narratives

Jen passes along this from Sun Magazine, a magazine I remember seeing and reading in B&N not too long ago.

And there's a due date coming up: May 1

Knocking on doors

Here is a rag-tag collection journalists answering the question of, do you knock on doors for stories?

The correct answer, almost always, yes. Please yes.  

Narrative story tips

From the annual Boston University narrative conference, here is some advice -- I've highlighted the best bits.

Always good to be reminded of this stuff.





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Elmore Leonard's Rules for Writing

Using adverbs is a mortal sin

• 10 Rules of Writing
• by Elmore Leonard
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