Fine, call me a Luddite or, even worse, a late adopter, but I say, Kindle-schmindle, Nook-schnook, give me a good old-fashioned book.

Yes, I have adopted, step by reluctant step, each new advance of the digital realm, Facebook, Google, Wikipedia and all the rest, and I've grown used to the virtual media's constant changing despite my constant grousing.  Continue reading...

If — two letters, one little puff of breath between tongue and teeth—ranks high among language's most powerful and mysterious words: little if can build all the castles in Spain. The dictionary calls if a conjunction meaning "supposing that"; I call if a trigger word, one that signals and sets off the extraordinary mental process we call imagination.  Continue reading...

Michael Lydon has contributed columns regularly here about the writer's art, but for this installment we asked him to tackle a form of writing with which he is particularly familiar: songwriting. Lydon has written about popular music since the '60s, and he also writes and performs his own music. Here he presents some songwriting advice from his "sometimes agonizing, sometimes blissful experience."  Continue reading...

To be or not to be, that is the question.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Happy families are all alike, unhappy families are unhappy each in their own way.

What do these famous sentences have in common? They are all general statements.  Continue reading...

"Writers struggle to get the right words down in the right order, to put every comma, or nearly every comma, in its proper place; and readers follow the writers' final sequence of words and commas as printed on the page," Michael Lydon writes, "but what happens between writer and reader is far more amorphous, more emotional than the precision needed for the process would suggest."  Continue reading...

Calling all writers! Here's a word to the wise:

Self-publish!

Sounds so good, let's say it again:

Self-publish, self-publish, self-publish!  Continue reading...

In physics class my high school junior year, I learned little, and of that little I remember little. Our brilliant though irascible teacher, Mr. Whitney, did, however, impress me with one fact of nature I've never forgotten.  Continue reading...