writing
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I read a lot of articles every week, and I try to focus my reading on the pieces I want to write, meaning longform or narrative nonfiction. This is a genre that’s published all over the place: in marketing materials (typically company magazines), consumer and trade publications, newspapers, web site — even BuzzFeed publishes longform.
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Read last week’s post here or view all other New York City posts. Time is currency. And this week, mine was spent — in research and at work. With it went my energy, so rather than sitting at my desk for three-plus hours, badgering myself to write something worth reading, I present the following: a conglomeration of thoughts,
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Read last week’s post here or view all other New York City posts. “You see that guy?” I said, nodding toward the Indian man who’d just parked his black SUV on the roadside and stepped out to catch the bus my housemate and I had just boarded. “Every day, he speeds up and parks his car, jumps out,
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Read last week’s post here or view all other New York City posts. Can we scrap the rest of this week and just look at today? Because today, I feel alive. Not that the rest of this week was worthless — it wasn’t. I worked, read the Bible (1 Samuel 1-13), interviewed an FDNY historian, found out I’m
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Read last week’s post here or view all other New York City posts. You can’t know who you are until you leave everything you’ve ever known. Not because being in an unfamiliar place surrounded by unfamiliar people brings you to some basic, almost neanderthal form of yourself. Not because everything new and strange helps you realize the person
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Read last week’s post here or view all other New York City posts. How do you find stories in a city of eight million? Where the default safety feature is zero eye contact, and you’re more likely to hear a person talking to himself or yelling at someone to “back off” than you are to overhear a
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Being a nonfiction writer has been my reason for not writing. “I don’t have any assignments,” she says, her voice raising from her throat to her nose. That excuse doesn’t cut it. If I am a writer, it’s because writing is an essential part of my being, it makes me who I am. If I
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The City Hall librarian, wearing fly-eyed, red-rimmed glasses, constantly talks to herself in a thick, nasal New York accent — whether or not people are around to listen. She only stops when the phone rings and she has to answer. On the way out of the room, she told another librarian she’d be right back.
Meredith Sell 