If you’re not familiar with Roy Peter Clark’s “50 Tools for Writers” you ought to be. These tools aren’t literal hammers and nails (pens and pencils), or even pieces of software. Rather, these tools are rules and guidelines for crafting a sentence, a paragraph, a story. They range from the overarching (“Work from a plan”) [...]

Thanks to a random night of Googling with Chris a while back, I (we) discovered a food writer at Time named Joel Stein. This is the guy I aspire to be one day: Forget about restaurant openings and specialty coffee roasters. Stein writes about horsemeat, wine in juiceboxes, and that one time he fasted for [...]

For all my professed cosmopolitan leanings, I’m still a Midwesterner at heart, because for me, without these, it’s not a holiday. As more proof that great journalism doesn’t have to be about taking down the mayor and changing the world, Post writer Monica Hesse takes us to the one and only French’s French Fried Onion [...]

This piece in an old Washington Post Style section cracked me up. Taste, guilt and barrel chairs are beasts preying on couples shopping on 14th Street. Perhaps they should seek counseling from Jennifer Marshall, a Stanford art history professor who specializes in 20th-century American aesthetics. Marshall listens to a description of the chairs. She says [...]

Why We Compete has been updated with its latest installment. This one’s about BASE jumping. Why We Compete: Adrenaline Edge of your seat rush, that’s for sure.

I just finished Water for Elephants last week. This is the New York Times bestseller, the one that looks like it should have an “Oprah’s Book Club” ribbon printed on the front. In short, the kind of book I try to stay away from. (So I’m a book snob. Sue me.) Yet on a whim [...]

Quick note over at DailyWritingTips about how to refer to business entities, etc., in writing. The comments got fairly spirited as well–I’m impressed!

Flickr:Chris Campbell Most people know that oenophiles have their own language to describe the complex flavors in a good glass of wine. What may be more surprising is that the world of coffee has almost as many words. One of my favorite coffee sites, Sweet Maria’s, has a reference guide to all the lingo, but [...]

This is the seventh in a weekly series about tools for writers. For the rest of the series, go here.) When you just don’t have inspiration for that fantasy or sci-fi epic, visit They Fight Crime! for the most creative story-starters ever. Examples: He’s a witless neurotic gentleman spy haunted by an iconic dead American [...]

I don’t know what sparked it, as I haven’t thought about this in almost two years, but today I found myself at Nanowrimo‘s website, thinking about signing up. Nanowrimo–or National Novel Writing Month–turns November into Crazember, asking would-be writers and published novelists alike to crank out 50,000 words before December 1. This is your brain [...]