What makes a story so compelling you can't shake it from your mind? To find out we called up veteran public radio broadcaster and award-winning storyteller Tony Kahn, a special correspondent on the news magazine The World, and the creator of Morning Stories, a weekly feature on WGBH Boston radio and web where people tell true tales in their own voice -- tales that stick.

Tony has honed his storytelling skills by writing, producing, narrating and hosting over 50 radio and TV programs and series for PBS, NPR, Nickelodeon and others. In an interview we read on the online Transom Review, he says:

When I am up against a deadline and I absolutely, definitely have to get on with my work, I use a few tactics to force myself to concentrate:

1. Switch off email. I don't start Outlook (or if I do, I disable all the notifications that tell me I have new mail).



2. Isolate myself. I use Bose noise-canceling headphones but don't plug them into anything. The silence really is golden.



3. Greed and guilt. I remind myself how much money I'm getting paid for a particular assignment and how ashamed I will be if I miss the deadline. This actually works sometimes.



4. Stop with the blog already. When I'm pressed for time, distractions like blogging and tidying up become very compelling. Knowing this makes it easier to resist.


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These are the five writer blogs that I, your humble editor, check out every day.

The Mechanic & the Muse . Reporter turned writing teacher Chip Scanlan's baby, on the art and carpentry of good prose.

Gangrey. Great storytelling from newspapers around the country, and so much more.

Collision Detection. Tech and culture writer Clive Thompson's collection.

Malcolm Gladwell . Tipping Point and Blink's author's. How can you not check it every day?

Creating Passionate Users . What writer doesn't want passionate readers?

Lisa Napoli, a senior reporter on public radio's Marketplace, has led a busy 20-year career as a journalist, covering diverse stories like the first Clinton campaign, the culture of the Internet and NASCAR racing; producing for CNN and Fox; writing for the New York Times; appearing on MSNBC; and, of course, telling stories on the radio. With Lisa's broad experience, we here at the Visual Thesaurus wondered how she writes differently for the ear -- and what we can learn from it. So we called up Lisa and asked her.

VT: What's unique about writing for radio?

Lisa: You have to get a lot of information across with very few words -- and you have to write it like you'd speak it. That sounds really simple but you're usually not taught to write conversationally. You have to make sure you read your stuff out loud. If it doesn't make sense when you say it, it's not conveying any information.

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We asked our Bad Language columnist Matthew Stibbe to tell us the top blogs on his "must surf" list. He says:

I scan over a hundred every day so it's hard to pick the good ones but I make a point of reading these four carefully.

Samuel Pepys's diary. This a blog created from the diaries of the famous historical figure.

Lifehacker. Neat geeky tricks for making life more efficient.

Guy Kawasaki. Always provocative and entertaining.

Presentation Zen. Really nice website about making presentations.

As the executive editor of the award-winning magazine Saveur and author of the soon-to-be-released W. W. Norton book Cradle of Flavor, on the cooking of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, James Oseland is celebrated for his writing about food -- just don't call him a "food writer." We caught up with James to ask him to parse this distinction, and tell us what makes for compelling writing on the subject of food:

VT: Is there such a thing as "food writing?"

James: We have a tendency to categorize in our culture, so we think of "food writing" as a thing, "science writing" as a thing, the work of a novelist as a thing. But good writing is good writing. It's essentially all the same thing, you know what I'm saying?