Dan Koeppel travels the world to write stories for National Geographic Adventure, Men's Journal, Backpacker, Popular Science and other major magazines. He's visited more than 40 countries, biked along the Silk Road in far-western China, birdwatched deep in the Amazon jungle and explored Paris to find the best croissants -- on rollerblades. But Dan says, "travel is just part of the stuff I'm doing."

In this installment of Bagel & Schmear -- my ongoing conversation about writing with playwright and ad creative exec Clark Morgan -- we discuss what the "controlling idea" means to your non-fiction writing. Whether putting together a business brief or best-seller, Clark says, "the controlling idea is your friend." [Editor]

VT: What is the controlling idea?

Clark: Everything you write needs to express one main thought, not twenty. When people finish reading what you've written, you want them to be able to easily say what it was about. You don't want, "Well, you got to read it." That's a bad answer.

VT: I just read this book called "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell.

Clark: Really? What's it about?

VT: Thinking. The kind of thinking that happens in the blink of an eye. Different facets of rapid cognition -- what goes on in our heads in two seconds, when are snap judgments good, when are they not. Is that what you mean?

This tiny but power-packed entry comes from an outstanding blog called Gangrey that describes itself as "prolonging the slow death of newspapers." It highlights great writing from papers across the country. The entry appeared on 03/14/06:

This Fresh Air interview with David Mamet and Shawn Ryan is instructive for storytellers in any medium.

Mamet ...

The trick is to leave everything out. That's the whole trick to drama. It's like the ability to hit the fastball, it's the ability to leave out the narration. You've got to leave the narration out because anybody can say, "Well, Jim, welcome back from Antarctica. We haven't seen you since we cured cancer together in 1985. How's your wife? Is she still an albino?"

If you take out the idea that you can overburden the show with narration ... then the question is: What information is really, really needed? And what information can we really do without?

Subscriber Donna Karlin, an executive coach whose own blog is A Better Perspective, says, "these are great interactive blogs where you have a set amount of time to write about a given word, poem or caption."

One Word

PoETC

One Caption

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I'm fed up with people stealing my brain. Over here, in merrie olde England, it is illegal to misuse people's computers, for example, by infecting them with viruses. But for some reason I haven't figured out yet, it is not illegal for bad writers to corrupt my neurons, waste my mental capacity and steal my time with shoddy prose.

This entry comes The Mechanic & the Muse , "an owners manual for writers" -- the terrific blog of respected journalist, columnist and teacher Chip Scanlan. It appeared on 3/6/6.

In his autobiography-cum-writing manual "On Writing," Stephen King recalls the summer day when he helped his Uncle Oren fix a broken screen at the back of his house. Uncle Oren was a carpenter and, like all craftsmen, he had a receptacle to hold his tools. King's description is lyrical: