Writers on writing - Gillian Flynn, Hunter S. Thompson & many on Gangrey

There's a few pieces on the subject of writing that I've seen over the past few weeks and found to be absolutely captivating. The most in-depth by far of the three was the post "Eating Jack Hooker's Cow" from the writing site Gangrey. About the 1997 Esquire story by Michael Paterniti, the Gangrey post really is a master class in writing with many great journalists giving their views on the piece and writing in general.

The other two pieces on writing to note here were much shorter ones with the much more recent being Joe Berkowitz for Fast Company Magazine writing on Gillian Flynn, author of both the book Gone Girl and screenplay of the excellent movie of the same name. Additionally, the site Boing Boing recently posted the highly entertaining "Hunter S. Thompson's 1958 cover letter for a newspaper job" from the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas among other well-known books.

Fast Company - Twitter, Boing Boing & Gaming

Lots of interesting articles and mentions from the Dec/Jan issue of Fast Company Magazine.



Cover story was "I Want My Twitter TV!" written by Ellen McGirt. The piece looks at how the company with an incredibly popular platform may have just found a way to really monetize what they do. Very innovative and cool stuff with a big push in the area of creating community around mass media.

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Also from this issue of Fast Company was a host of other things of note...

Profiled was the blog Boing Boing and it's founders/current contributors. Basic premise of the article is these guys started the blog because they wanted to write on things they found interesting... and have continued towards that exact same goal. Something to be said for this idea of doing things that give you enjoyment.

A piece titled "How Video Games Are Infiltrating—and Improving—Every Part of Our Lives" about... well, that. Pretty fascinating topic that featured content about Jane McGonigal and a famous in it's circles talk on games from Jesse Schell (video below from the TED website).

PS3 Games - E3 2011 - Wii Fit Plus

"Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters" by Scott Rosenberg

I first heard about Scott Rosenberg's "Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters" from a BusinessWeek review of the book and found it to be an excellent book on a few different levels.

Book Content

The beginning of the book details some of the early blogging from people like Justin Hall... along with his "dark night" blogging sign-off video. From this point, Rosenberg goes into the "warblog" movement out of 9/11 and rise of political blogs. The influence of these has been significant ranging from the blog Little Green Footballs helping call into question the "60 Minutes" piece on George W Bush and his National Guard record to Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo blog helping both fight off the Bush plan to kill social security & bringing to light the Alberto Gonzalez scandal around firing Justice Department lawyers.

Also featured in the book is the blog Dooce from Heather Armstrong. Sitting firmly in the "narrative life story" blog category, this blog author became famous for being fired from a job due to her blogging about it. From that point, she's written some very personal stuff that's at the same time very funny (and it's cool that "getting dooced" has since become the descriptive phrase for someone getting fired as a result of their blogging.

From this same influential blogger category, I found interesting mention of Robert Scoble and his video on how to scan through 600+ RSS Feeds daily.

Additionally, there's detail given by Rosenberg as to some mechanics that have helped blogging become so successful. The range from the “last in first out” (or "stacking") principle of blog postings to features such as Permalink, Trackback (or Backlinks in Google Blogger) and RSS Feeds (which were of course mentioned above).

Another area that's touched on towards the end of the book is around the introduction and subsequent popularization of Social Media sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. Rosenberg's theory (which seems sound to me) is that these sites don't signal the end of blogs as the intent and execution of them is so different than that of blogging. The new Social Media forms can almost be considering a telephone type communication in that they're about short form communication and contact with others. Blogging on the other hand is about a longer form publishing of thoughts. There is of course some blend between blogging and Social Media in each direction, but also differences.


What It Meant to Me

Everything above describes the book and it's contents... good things for sure to have in any review of a book. Below, though, I want to touch on some of the things that struck me while reading and I "may very well" carry forward.

The basic concept I took is that there's so much that could be done with a blog. There could be important political discourse, could be insightful and profound narrative, or could simply be thoughts and ideas about things of import that a blog author wants to pass on.

I particularly enjoyed mention from Rosenberg's book about the blog Boing Boing. The statement of the blog is "A Directory of Wonderful Things" and Rosenberg's discussion is around how the four blog authors really enjoy doing the site. At the end of the day, that should be the reason that someone writes a blog and whether it "becomes a hit" isn't as important (and especially isn't as controllable).

I also was fascinated by the personal narrative quality of Dooce. I'll have to see what direction my writing takes me, but am interested in spending time on and exploring this "personal narrative" writing. As long as it's done with the best quality I can muster (after all, a blog is a written record (or "resume" in work terms) and I'm enjoying writing it, things should work out just fine like.

Finally, back to the book... solid read and further details can be found on Rosenberg's blog and his "Say Everything..." book website.