#writing

I anticipate confusion regarding the name of this site. How is it a book?

A virtue of concrete writing is that it causes a distinct mental sensation.

I began with this sentence:

These opportunities in my early life allowed me to become not only natively proficient in Spanish and English, but also multicultural.

Is wordiness inherently bad?

I want to make the following sentence more fluid by removing its commas, but they are preventing ambiguity:

Vague memories, without any obvious relevance to what I was witnessing, bubbled into my conscious mind.

I wrote what makes a good shower? a couple months ago and I saved four versions of the same paragraph to analyze side by side.

Can quantifying the attributes of a TV show tell us something about its quality?

I had this encounter in October of 2022, almost two years ago.

In her New Yorker article about suspense, Kathryn Schulz uses a clever image to describe how suspense exists at many scales.

In November I posted my first /now update and since then I have posted three more.

Our roommate started dating our neighbor a couple months ago and it’s going great.

The main reason I read Cormac McCarthy is to experience and learn from his writing craft.

…looking again in the old books, I find so much pleasure in the authority of [Cormac McCarthy’s] voice, and the wisdom that flames out from his pages, and it is painful to imagine that such a fire has been extinguished.

When I have kids I will definitely show them this movie.

Even though Spotify categorizes it as a podcast, Random Tape is something else.

This site – okjuan.me/vbook – contains all my public writing.

One of my favorite movies of recent times.

I’ve been developing Muze Radio, reading Stephen King, watching Poor Things, and more.

Here’s an example of coordinated metaphors, something I wish other writers used more often.

Half memoir, half advice for aspiring fiction writers. Both good.

King’s advice is mostly for fiction, but some of it applies to non-fiction, too.

There was this little voice whispering to me that the book was really good, and if I didn’t finish, I would regret it forever.

Don’t come up with the plot of your story, says Stephen King.

I’ve been losing weight, playing soccer, developing this site, reading books, and more.

This page is inspired by Viktor Lofgren’s The Small Website Discoverability Crisis and Tom Critchlow’s list of digital bookshelves.

A not-so-secret desire of mine is to write non-fiction professionally.

I wrote an essay called The Virtual Book but I never defined the term.

I read half of The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer’s gargantuan, Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction novel about Gary Gilmore – and figured I could put it down and move on.

Take this quote by anthropologist Clifford Geertz:

One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.

Really really good. It shows that McCurdy is not just interested in telling her story but also interested in writing as a craft.

Suppose you have this sentence:

It leads us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning into the future

I picked up this book to learn about Norman Mailer’s writing style. He really is a very good chronicler.

Any aspiring non-fiction writer should read this.

Writing The Virtual Book forced me to ask: when is writing the best medium?

It’s important to keep your metaphors from bumping into one another.

This is my second review of this book. I have to say – it won me over, big time.

Notes about style and process of writing how to work #2.

Really beautiful. Poetic. A bit repetitive.

A gem! An exercise in the art of understatement and a great example of fruitful experimentation with the novel form.

A twisting plot with topical themes woven in elegantly. My main complaint is that they get the characters to tell you things that the story itself explains well enough.

Notes on style and process of writing The Virtual Book.

Decades ago, The New Yorker and other magazines experimented with the journalistic form by introducing literary techniques into it.

The prose is great, incredibly tidy and evocative.

A poor adaptation… too literal.

An incredibly entertaining read, full of absurd, shocking, and sometimes unbelievable scenes. An awesome example of writing as craft.

I just love the writing.

I really enjoyed watching this in theatres. However, is this not yet another movie that glorifies Dominator culture?

Awesome read about an accomplished writer’s career and life.

The imagery in the opening scenes is fantastic.

Steinbeck brings you into a world, not only through colorful, vivid descriptions but also rich characters whose lives we witness over decades.

Notes about style and process of writing how to work.

My two main problems with this movie are Jack Nicholson’s character, Costello, and The Love Interest.

Despite all my admiration and enchantment while reading Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast I couldn’t help but frowning at his writing mantra: “make instead of describing”. Surely he’s been describing all along?

It’s exciting to see Black America represented in a Pixar movie: to hear Charles Mingus and A Tribe Called Quest, to see reflected the work ethic, family values, and sense of community.

It is a movie about him, but it is told through her. It is a story about his failure to connect with others.

At the beginning it’s mostly fancy transitions and strings and choreography and facades and props. Past their yelling, the characters are pretty shallow.

Tara Westover’s writing is clear, poignant, and deeply thoughtful.