contributorMichael Lydon
Michael Lydon, who has written about popular music since the 1960s, is the author of Writing and Life, published by University Press of New England. He has also published a dozen other essays on literature through his own Franklin Street Press. Lydon teaches "The Music of Writing" at St. John's University and leads seminars for teenage writers through the Connecticut Young Writers program.
We take for granted much of a book's white space: margins; paragraph indents; section breaks; extra space given to chapter-opening pages; extra space at the end of chapters left blank. Yet white space plays a crucial role in writing.
Continue reading...
Word CountWriters Talk About WritingBob Dylan: Joker and Thinker. Cynic and Believer. Lover and Loner. December 21, 2016 By Michael Lydon
Bob Dylan has led and still leads generations of us ordinary men and women through the day-in, day-out, year-in, year-out battle to keep our feet on the ground, our eyes on the stars, and our souls battered but unbowed.
Continue reading...
Article Topics:
Ta-da! You're about to read my eightieth column for Visual Thesaurus—Happy Column! Penning (on computer of course) twelve hundred words on aspects of writing every few weeks has been a pleasurable discipline that's taught me, I hope, to say a lot in a little.
Continue reading...
Word CountWriters Talk About WritingMy Favorite Writer: Anthony Trollope September 2, 2016 By Michael Lydon
All avid readers have their own favorite writers. Yours may be Daniel Defoe or Charles Dickens, Vladimir Nabokov or Ogden Nash, Agatha Christie or Anton Chekhov, F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway, P. G. Wodehouse or A. A. Milne, Philip Roth or Stephen King; whom you love matters little. What does matter is that something in the style, the subject, or the subtleties of one or another writer so matches your own passions and quirks that you fall in love with that writer, and year after year you keep returning to enjoy his or her cordial company.
Continue reading...
A couple of years ago I wrote a Visual Thesaurus column about writing song lyrics, focusing on basics: finding a storyline and a mood that many people can relate to, telling the story with simple words and painting the mood with vivid images, plus, without being vague, leaving plenty of room for romantic mystery.
Continue reading...
Article Topics:Word CountWriters Talk About WritingFinding the Facts in Fiction: Dreiser's "The Bulwark" June 20, 2016 By Michael Lydon
All fiction rests on a foundation of fact. Even if an author describes five-headed creatures who live on Planet Zobar and drink purple water, he or she must give readers enough feeling of life for us to imagine the world the words create.
Continue reading...
Here's a perennially useful guide for choosing what book to read next: think of a title you've long known by name but never read, go straight to a library or bookstore, get it, and read it. Through decades that guide has steered me to Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Hugo's Les Miserables, all of Austen, Dickens, and Twain, and many, many more. Continue reading... |
