One of the things a lot of younger writers find hard to do that I have always found easier than most is writing "kickers," those pithy little sentences that come at the very end of reviews or thinkpieces or whatever and are supposed to leave you with one
So as I said a few days ago (before the plane's descent so rudely interrupted me), sitting down with some sort of structure in mind when you're writing a thinkpiece/essay/what-have-you can be the difference between a great piece and one that just repeats itself
The most common mistake I find in thinkpieces around this great internet of ours is that they repeat themselves over and over and over again. They find a way to say the same thing in five or six different ways, slap on an intro and conclusion, then get out. After
Over the weekend, New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik, a friend, tweeted something that resonated with me: of all the pieces of writing advice you can give someone, "write what you know" is about the lousiest. (James's two tweets are here and here.) It'
So a couple of years ago, I made a typo. It wasn't the world's worst typo – I just switched an actor's first name for the character they played. And because I kept very weird hours back then (often going to bed at 6 am
When I interviewed him recently in connection to The Girlfriend Experience, Steven Soderbergh said something that struck me as true of almost all of the arts. (Please go read that interview. I genuinely believe it's one of the best things I've ever done, and, like, nobody
First rule of criticism (or any opinion writing): If you have the words "in my opinion" in there somewhere, cut them out. Heck, if you have the words "I think" in there, cut them out, 999 times out of 1,000. The exception, generally, is if
Few aspects of being a critic seem to fascinate readers more than the making of the annual top 10 list. (Okay, getting TV screeners/attending movie screenings are more interesting to most.) The irony here is that many critics hate to make them — narrowing a full year down to just
Criticism is sleight of hand. It's three-card monte. It's whatever you call that game with the cups where there's a ball under one of the cups. What I mean by this is that criticism is a personal essay that either needs to put the
I read a lot of writing from young, wannabe critics in my job. That's partially because of my annual Christmas readathon (which I still have to complete for 2014... don't tell anyone). It's partially because my job involves keeping up with younger, up-and-coming writers.
(This was by far my favorite picture when I Google image searched "writing.") People often ask me for writing advice. Actually, that's not specifically true. Usually, when people ask me for writing advice, they're asking for career advice. They want to know how to