Monday, July 28, 2014

Assorted excellent writing - by Flynn, Kruse & Sloan

There's a few pieces of excellent writing I've come across recently that don't necessarily have a huge connecting thread between them, but all really well done on interesting topics.

Each story I came across via Twitter and by far the oldest of them was from the July 2000 issue of Esquire with "The Perfect Fire" by Sean Flynn. It's about about a giant warehouse blaze fought by firefighters in Worcester, MA and remarkably tense writing that brought to mind some of the best works of authors like Sebastian Junger or Jon Krakauer.

The second piece to note here was from the August 2014 issue of Charlotte Magazine with "Period.
The man who writes obituaries, the people who hire him, and what we learn from our last words" by Michael Kruse. It struck me as as well-written and kind of quiet piece about death, and about a writer in Ken Garfield who attempts to describe well the lives lived by others.

The third story was published in June with Robin Sloan writing "The secret of Minecraft: And its challenge to the rest of us" for the site Medium. If the Flynn piece could be characterized as being about tension and drama and the one from Kruse about reverence and meaning, that from Sloan strikes me as being on secrets and exploration. There's something about the tone of how he describes Minecraft and the appeal and positive of it for kids that really resonated with me. Additionally, description of the game and its creative element for players made me think back to a 2008 Esquire story by Jason Fagone on game designer Jason Rohrer and how he "turns video games into art."