Verb Plow

  1)   Get up early and write first. Don't let the day get in the way of what you have to do, and by getting up early,   if someo...

My mother used to say that when I was born I didn’t cry; I coughed. And I am alive today only because the company my father worked ...

I've written tweets of ten words, blog posts of fifty to a thousand, articles between 300 and 10,000 words, and books between 20,000 wor...

When do you know it is time to write a book? For any non-fiction writer, that question actually represents two questions. For the writer wh...

Earlier today a friend asked me a question about writing and restraint, which was inspired by a post by Chris Jones on his blog http://sonof...

Several months ago, in his farewell column in ESPN The Magazine, Rick Reilly noted that “My math says this column puts me over one million p...

One of the greatest challenges a young writer will ever face is continuing to write without the forced deadline of a school assignment or a ...

As close readers of The Best American Sports Writing know, the Guest Editor makes the final call each year. Unless I am asked, I stay out t...

I am pleased to announce that the guest editor for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's The Best American Sports Writing 2010, the twentieth annu...

After driving more than 1,500 miles over the last week - to Ohio and back - I’ ve thought quite a bit about length and distance. And as the...

While I generally don’t think writers and actors have that much in common, I do think we share a capacity (or at least a desire) to “inhabit...

I can almost hear it. All you can ask for from writing a book is the chance for people to hear about it and read it. The sad fact is that...

And I mean it. My new book Young Woman & the Sea (see previous posts) was just selected a “Best Summer Read” by the Wall Street Journal,...

Once upon a time when I was beginning to write sports and social history, the print portion of what flacks and reviewers usually call “exhau...

P.O.W. Two weeks since the war started and I have already surrendered thrown up the white flag relinquished my gun, and turned myself over. ...

One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Wilcy Moore, one of the first relief pitchers and a key member of the 1927 Yankees. "I ain...

No matter what you write or in what genre, occasionally read your work into a tape recorder and then listen to it closely when you play it b...

Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World , the story of the first woman to swim the En...

Without poetry, I'm not a writer, pure and simple. I was thirteen and had to do a school project, using magazine illustrations and photo...