May 3, 2018. Springfield Missouri to Tulsa Oklahoma Themes of the day are ugly English tourists, underwhelming attractions, and decent ice cream. A storm system passes overnight and it continues raining for most of the morning. The day’s planned route is not terribly long so we make a leisurely morning and hope for the weather …
As I set about creating the second blog of my life, I am thinking about the liberty of the blogger. The writer enjoys various degrees of liberty in the different kinds of things they write. In a diary or journal you may safely say almost anything, as long as you leave instructions in your will …
May 2, 2018. St. Louis to Springfield MO We head out of St. Louis toward Springfield, Missouri on a route that takes us through the Ozarks. Themes for the day: thousands of tiny attractions, bridges that memorialize corporals rather than generals, and wonky navigation units. The Garmin, which served us so well in Chicago, decides …
Grand Tour 4: Memorializing Corporals, not Generals Read More »
Monday, April 30, 2018 Springfield to St Louis I resume the long-delayed transcribing of my Grand Tour travel diary in the midst of a pandemic which has meant, among other inconveniences, that I am at home on my laptop instead of somewhere in Utah, as originally planned for this October. Some say that the purpose …
Grand Tour 3: The Road as a Museum to Ordinary Eccentricity Read More »
One should always prefer the active voice over the passive, they tell us. Baloney. Active and passive are technical grammatical terms that have nothing to do with how active or passive your writing is. The distinction between the two forms actually has to do with whether the focus of your statement is the actor or …
I am puzzled by how imprecise writers sometimes are when they talk about their craft. If any craft should be precise and lucid in the description of what it does, it should be writing. But it’s not. A case in point: the distinction between “present tense” and “past tense” narratives.
The practice of close reading a text is an interesting one. It implies that normal reading is less close. So what is the point of reading a text more closely than normal? Does it yield a better reading experience? Does it provide a window into the soul, or at least the technique of a writer? And …
The name of this blog, Stories All the Way Down, comes from a presentation I gave back in my days in corporate and technical communication. There is a tendency in those fields to debate if storytelling is a relevant or useful tool for business and technical communication. My contention was, and is, that all communication …
Hi. I’m a novelist. You’ve never heard of me. Read my blog. Because that’s the game here, isn’t it. Writers set up blogs because we are told we need a platform. We need followers We need to be someone. It’s the same Catch-22 as looking for your first job. You need experience to get a …
This post originally appeared on my other blog, Every Page is Page One. The series on our Grand Tour will continue here. Monday, April 30, 2018, Bloomington to Springfield, Il. The second day of our Grand Tour, Monday, April 30, 2018, covered only 100 km from Bloomington to Springfield Illinois. The day was really about …
Grand Tour 2: The Lincoln Museum as Shrine and Reliquary Read More »
