Search Results for: writing

Longreads Best of 2014: Essay Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in essay writing.

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Meaghan O’Connell
Freelance writer, “Birth Story” author, motherhood columnist at The Cut, who believes her best work is at The Billfold.

The Empathy Exams (Leslie Jamison, The Believer)

I did not know who Leslie Jamison was before I read her essay “Empathy Exams” late one night at the pie shop that I use as an office when the library is closed. I was hungry, and it was dark out, and I was very pregnant and needed to get home. But I stayed in that uncomfortable chair and read it the whole way through, bursting with excitement. I G-chatted friends in all caps asking them if they’d read it. I Googled her, saw she had a book coming out, and floated home feeling like, “Yes, let’s do this. Let’s write some fucking personal essays, people!” I think Jamison, especially here, convinced or re-convinced a lot of people of the possibilities and the value of writing in the first person. Of course I think it’s horse shit that it takes a white lady with a veneer of intellectualism to make it okay, but I’ll take it where I can get it. Jamison, for her part, rises to the occasion. She certainly reminded me to hang onto the art of the thing, all the while going deeper, letting the problem of whatever you’re trying to do take up its own space. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2014: Sports Writing

Longreads Pick

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in sports writing.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 16, 2014

Longreads Best of 2014: Sports Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in sports writing.

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Eva Holland
Freelance writer based in Canada’s Yukon Territory.

Together We Make Football (Louisa Thomas, Grantland)

It’s been a bad year for football: Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, the lingering Jameis Winston saga. And a bad year for football means a big year for think pieces about violence and football—I couldn’t tell you how many of those I read this year. But one of them stood out. In “Together We Make Football,” Louisa Thomas reflects on the uncomfortable relationship between the NFL, masculinity, violence, and women. She takes her time, building a case slowly and methodically, before driving home her point: that violence is inherent to, and integral to, the NFL. That although the vast majority of football players don’t beat their wives, there may be no way to separate the bad violence—the off-field violence—from the on-field violence that we love. Here’s Thomas: Read more…

‘Suddenly I Knew Why I Was Writing a Story at Any Particular Moment’

To learn the craft, I’d just written random stories, whatever came into my head, attempting to storify any thought as practice for figuring out what works and what doesn’t. But just writing whatever wasn’t really being a writer. A writer, it seemed to me at the time, was someone with a creative or intellectual project that lasted not the length of a story but over years of writing many different things.

I asked myself what I was fascinated by, scared of, drawn to, repelled by, in love with. What did I like thinking about and what could I never find an end to musing over? For me, then, it was the natural world, any angle of it. I opened this umbrella and began to write stories that fit under it. And suddenly I knew why I was writing a story at any particular moment. Even if it was a mysterious or troublesome one, I knew I was pursuing something with it. The thing is, I’m not sure these pursuits are ever very obvious to anyone but me. They get obscured. Or maybe they are really just the jumping-off points that send me back to the big questions we all think about, the stuff too big to approach head on. Like, I tell myself I’m exploring the wilderness, but really I’m trying to figure out grief. But the concept of the ongoing ‘project’ forces me to remember that writing is active and not just a product.

— In Granta, Sam Lipsyte and Diane Cook correspond with one another about the craft of writing stories. The above is from Cook. Before working on her own stories, Cook was a producer for This American Life, which taught her how to put together stories in a very specific way.

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Photo: Julie Jordan Scott

How Tolstoy’s Writing Mirrored His Own Life

There are a number of reasons a writer may waffle on the question of which events in the book match up with her life. Most writers receive the question of whether something in their fiction “really happened” as an accusation, without being exactly sure what they are being accused of. There can be the egotistical concern that a writer is considered less “creative” if what she has done is “simply” to document what happened in “real life.” But everybody knows, or should, that just because something happened does not guarantee dynamite on the page. Effervescent dinner parties recorded and transcribed read like somber autopsies. Also, a writer may wish to preserve some privacy—not only for herself, but also to protect the people she is already betraying.

Still, the connection between writing and reality is impossible to ignore. This is not just a question of “realism,” or of the sort of undramatized alignment with actual events that fills the six volumes of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Consider Tolstoy. Levin’s proposal to Kitty in Anna Karenina (which takes place over a board game) mirrored Tolstoy’s own proposal, and the scene in which the young fiancé insists on showing his bride-to-be the diaries recounting his extensive youthful debaucheries also came straight from Tolstoy’s life. He seems not to have gone to any great lengths to disguise identities—the maid in Levin’s house, Agafya Mikhaylovna, has the precise name of one of his own maids, and in the early drafts of War and Peace the central family was called “the Tolstoys.” According to one of his biographers, Tolstoy performed his work in progress for his family and friends. The biographer makes it sound like a party: “Doctor Bers arranged an evening at the house. … Tolstoy was to read aloud from his novel. … [T]he more pages he read, the more vividly they all began to recognize themselves. ‘Mama?’, the hostess ecclaimed. ‘Marya Dmitriyevna Akhrosimov is you!’”

From a piece by Mona Simpson about the Italian writer Elena Ferrante, which appeared in The New Republic.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Interview: Simon Rich on Guilt, Humor Writing, and Being the Worst Person Ever

Jessica Gross | Longreads | Oct. 2014 | 17 minutes (4,290 words)

By the time Simon Rich graduated from Harvard, where he served as president of the Harvard Lampoon, he had a two-book deal from Random House. Less than a decade later, the humorist has written four short story collections and two comic novels. He also spent four years writing for Saturday Night Live (he was the youngest writer SNL ever hired) and about two years at Pixar, and is now at work on a film and a television series.

Rich’s level of productivity, impressive as it is, takes a backseat to the quality of his humor writing. His stories are crystalline, eccentric, and universally hilarious. Many of the stories in his new collection, Spoiled Brats are built on an unusual premise, or told from a surprising angle. In “Animals,” a hamster narrates his wretched existence as a class pet at an elementary school. In “Gifted,” a mother insists that her son—born as a monster, with horns and a tail—is exceptional. And in “Distractions,” a writer believes the whole world is out to get him, and they really are.

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How old were you when you started actively, seriously writing?

Well, I always loved to write. As early as kindergarten, I plagiarized Roald Dahl stories that I would try to pass off as my own. But I think it sort of shifted around when I was 17. That’s when I started writing every single day, whether or not I had an idea. Until then, I would only sit down and write a story if one occurred to me, and then I started to wake up every single day and write for a few hours whether or not I had anything worthwhile to say.

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Interview: Simon Rich on Guilt, Humor Writing, and Being the Worst Person Ever

Longreads Pick

An interview with humorist Simon Rich on comedy, writing stories for the New Yorker vs. writing sketches for SNL, and his new book Spoiled Brats.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 14, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,290 words)

Interview: Caitlin Moran on the Working Class, Masturbation, and Writing a Novel

Longreads Pick

An interview with journalist, critic, and essayist Caitlin Moran, who just published her debut novel, How to Build a Girl.

Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 26, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,300 words)

Interview: Caitlin Moran on the Working Class, Masturbation, and Writing a Novel

Jessica Gross | Longreads | Sept. 25, 2014 | 13 minutes (3,300 words)

Caitlin Moran has worked as a journalist, critic, and essayist in the U.K. for over two decades, since she was 16. In her 2011 memoir/manifesto, How to Be a Woman, she argued women should keep their vaginas hairy, said she has no regret over her own abortion, and advocated for the term “strident feminist.” Moran brings the same gallivanting, taboo-crushing spirit to her debut novel, How to Build a Girl, which follows Johanna Morrigan, a working class teenager, as she navigates her way toward adulthood. Morrigan shares a few traits with Moran, from her background and career path to her obsession with music and masturbation.

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As I read How to Build a Girl, I pictured you laughing uproariously to yourself as you were writing it. But in the acknowledgments, you say, “Writing a book is literally worse than giving birth to a baby—in hell.”

I wrote the acknowledgments in a welter of self-pity. I love writing—it’s the easiest thing in the world for me to do. But all through that summer, my children and husband would disappear and come back all covered in sand, having been to the beach while I sat at the table I’m at now, in the garden, chain smoking roll-up cigarettes, chain-drinking coffee. I was working so hard that I genuinely thought I’d have to go to the psychiatrist and get some valium prescribed to me. I’ve always been incredibly cheerful and laid-back, and that summer I was incredibly anxious and depressed, like my head was going to explode. There was one morning where I was putting the coffee pot on, and I noticed it said that it made 12 cups of espresso. I’d been drinking that, diluted with milk, before lunchtime. I stopped drinking the coffee, and it all got a bit easier after that. Do not drink 12 espressos before midday. It’s enormously bad for your mind.

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While Writing for ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ I Realized I Am Gay

Longreads Pick

Lauren Morelli was a newlywed who had just landed her dream job when she started as a writer on ‘Orange Is the New Black.’ As Piper and Alex’s relationship played out on screen, Morelli found herself struggling with her own sexual identity, eventually realizing that she was gay. Here, she writes about the struggles and freedom of coming out at 31.

Source: Identities.Mic
Published: May 21, 2014
Length: 7 minutes (1,757 words)