How to Write

The O’Reilly “So You Want to Write a Book guide is quite a good one and takes you from the proposal through the publication. The GNOME Documentation Project Style Guide is enough to convince anyone that technical writing is the opposite of style. Same for this article from the Chronicle in which a textbook author chronicles his discontents.

Steve Almond knows how to write really well. In the first story the narrator recalls his rock-out youth as a rock concert reviewer for a newspaper, cheating on his girlfriend, and says: “It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.”

I, too, am still broken. I will always be broken, because I am human, and we are all inherently flawed. But it’s through the flaws that beauty comes in, I think. Or maybe just the rain.