Byliner

Left this in another thread, but here's the definitive profile of Ramis, by Tad Friend of The New Yorker. It examines the how and why Ramis's movies have stayed so funny for so many years. The author has unlocked it for the next 24 hours:

https://www.byliner.com/tad-friend/stories/comedy-first?AFID...

Hi. Some excellent suggestions in this thread already. Here are a few more.

1. Read great writing. If you want to write better nonfiction, read the masters of nonfiction. Michael Lewis. Tracy Kidder. Atul Gawande. Joseph Mitchell. Jon Krakauer. Christopher Hitchens. Tom Junod. If you want to write great fiction, read Murakami, Marquez, Palahniuk, Eggers, Hosseni, Oates, Atwood. (Shameless plug here, you can find stories by these folk at Byliner: http://www.byliner.com )

2. Read about writing. Some worthy books on this:

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King (really!)

The Practice of Writing, by David Lodge

The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott

Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd

To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, by Phillip Lopate

3. As already mentioned upthread, practice. Write something every day.

4. If you're not confident in your writing, apply your MVP lessons. Write short sentences. Use as few words as possible. Rid your sentences of adjectives and adverbs. Study your verb choices. Ditch the complex punctuation and dependent clauses. Ask yourself, What's the least amount of "writing" necessary to convey this idea or image?

5. Have fun.

This is indeed an awesome list of amazing stories, as chosen by Kevin and his crowd-sourcing friends.

KK's a friend of Byliner, and all of the pieces from this list are also on Byliner.com, although organized by writer, for convenience. Thus, if you like a specific story, you can easily do a deep dive into that writer's full body of work, which often includes dozens more great stories. (Think of it as a Github or Dribble page for that writer.) And if you read a full-text story as a subscriber, the author actually splits all subscription revenue generated by their story. It's an exciting model, and we have more than two hundred of the world's best writers on our network already, selling 1M+ stories directly to their readers. You can explore some of our writers here:

https://www.byliner.com/writers/popular

Amy Tan, Margaret Atwood, Jon Krakauer, Ann Patchett, Nick Hornby, Chuck Palahniuk, Sebastian Junger, and more.

Don, I'll second the notion that you're already a very fine writer! I'd be happy to chat writing with you any time you'd like.

Yep, there's a glitch. We'll look into it. In the meantime, feel free to email me and I'll hook you up with a copy.

I don't think you'll feel that way about the full book. Send me an email (info in my profile) and I'll send you a complimentary copy. If you enjoy it, you can amend your comment; if not, no foul.

Here's a brief excerpt from the book:

http://byliner.com/lawrence-lessig/stories/one-way-forward-e...

If you're looking for a DRM-free version, we made that available via Apple's iBookstore and Google's eBookstore (now known as Google Play). A print-on-demand version is available via Blurb.com. All of these buying options are reachable from the book's page on Byliner:

http://byliner.com/originals/one-way-forward

One aspect of Byliner that's interesting (we hope) is the ability for authors to either update their stories, or provide detail behind their stories. A good example is Jon Krakauer's Three Cups of Deceit. In the months since its publication Jon has added 20,000 words of updates to his story:

http://byliner.com/jon-krakauer/stories/excerpt-three-cups-o...

Most of our authors continue to evolve their stories after publication, to the benefit of readers. We hope that Professor Lessig does the same with One Way Forward, which we were very proud to publish.

Here's the newspaper site if you care to visualize the tracking: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten

Here's a better link to the details:

http://breadpig.com/hack-club/