My day never really gets going until I read what Nancy Nall has to say, as well as her regular commenters. Reading her blog has been a daily habit for, gosh, maybe a decade now.
Lately, both in class and in the Kaimin critiques on Friday (the student-run paper at the University of Montana), I’ve been trying to stress clarity and finesse in stories. You can know the basics of newswriting (fives W’s, one H, arranged in inverted pyramid, and hello, where is the nutgraf?) and still spend the rest of your career struggling to make it all clearer, more coherent, uncluttered, smoother. Many times I find myself asking what the story I’m reading is about — especially with feature stories, whether by students or in the nation’s best magazines.
Not to suggest that some of these exceptionally nice and smart reviews make me happier than others, and I know this just affirms the notion that the New York media elite has a disproportionate grip on a writer’s sense of self-worth, but SHUT UP AND CHECK OUT MY BOOK’S “BRIEFLY NOTED”