contributorMichael Lydon Word CountWriters Talk About WritingHow A Personal Writing Style Develops  March 7, 2014
In 1911 Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was a thirty-year-old British writer living both in England and America. His upper-crust background and boarding school education had given him a knack for turning out satires of high society. Yet Wodehouse hadn't found his voice as a writer: what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it.
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"Try reading books by your favorite writers in the order they were written, and you'll find the effects of time on each writer's spirit," says Michael Lydon, who considers how time shaped Leo Tolstoy into a mature prose stylist.
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Word CountWriters Talk About WritingThe Power of Reading Good Books January 9, 2014
The single most valuable thing an aspiring writer can do to improve his or her work may be stated in three words: Read good books! Unfortunately, the statement begs the question, what makes a good book? The book you prize I may scorn; the book that thrills me may bore you.
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Stories, we learn in school, must have beginnings, middles, and ends. Creating each leg of the age-old triangle poses daunting challenges, yet for writers eager to write a deathless masterpiece, no challenge is more daunting than beginning.
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The Rolling Stones Discover America, my eyewitness account of a month-long Stones tour in 1969, became an Amazon Kindle Single e-book early this year, and now Hachette is publishing it as an audio book. When Hachette Audio's editor Anthony Goff and I shook hands on the deal in June, I asked if I could narrate the book.
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Word CountWriters Talk About WritingLiterary Criticism a Century Ago: A Bracing Blast from the Past October 9, 2013 By Michael Lydon
Browsing the shelves of a hushed private library recently, I came across a small book, Essays on Modern Novelists, by William Lyon Phelps. The author's name rang a faint bell, so I took the book down, blew off decades of dust, opened its stiff brown covers, and flipped through its yellowed pages, many of them still uncut.
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Word CountWriters Talk About WritingGood Writing: Through a Glass Clearly September 5, 2013 By Michael Lydon
You and I want to be good writers, but what will make our writing good? Inspiration, perspiration, determination, and endless revision — all fine answers, but the biggest answer is: good writing captures life.
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