Does anyone beside me know who Jim Furyk is? Jim Furyk swinging his Authentic Swing Jim Furyk is a 16-time winner on the PGA tour, the 2003 U.S. Open champion—and possessor of the single weirdest, loopiest, most homemade swing on the planet. As I write this on Saturday, September 14th, Jim Furyk has just become the sixth golfer in history to shoot a 59 in PGA competition. He did it yesterday in the second round of the BMW Championship. Shooting a 59 in competition on the PGA tour is like Kobe Bryant scoring 81 points in an NBA game (which he…

First lemme thank everybody who has signed up for FIRST LOOK ACCESS and is following the Foolscap videos (#1 last week, #2 this week) and the introduction of The Authentic Swing (all only available through FIRST LOOK ACCESS). Wow, what a sentence. Totally incomprehensible to anyone who is not a regular reader of this blog. Thinking about this got me mulling how publishing has changed and how this blog has evolved over just the past four years. Here’s a bird’s-eye view: When I sit down to compose a Writing Wednesdays post, I open a folder in my MacBook titled “AFGHANISTAN.”…

It took me thirty years to get my first novel published. Along the way I wrote three other full-length novels (and about thirty screenplays), each of which took two years of full-time work and none of which made the cut. A few years ago I took those early book-attempts down from the shelf and looked them over, wondering if they might be worth resuscitating. Answer: arrrrggggh! They were not ready then, and they’re not ready now. What makes something ready for the Big Leagues? How long do we have to languish in the minors before we break through? What does it…

There was a great article in the L.A. Times of August 19 about the B-52 bomber. Remember Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, straddling a hydrogen bomb in the bomb bay of a Strategic Air Command plane, then dropping into thin air while cutting loose a Rebel yell? That was a B-52. In real life the aircraft first saw service in the 1950s. It’s still flying today. With the latest upgrades, the B-52 is expected to remain as the Air Force’s #1 workhorse bomber into the 2040s. But here’s the sentence from the article that leapt out at me: Now the plane,…

My apologies to everyone who got psyched up, a few weeks ago, to learn more about the Foolscap Method (which I wrote about then in this space and promised to write about again), only to have me drop the ball completely. Sorry! There’s a reason. We’ve been working feverishly over the past few weeks to re-jigger this site to handle some new long-form material that we want to make available to our regular readers. That’s what the FIRST LOOK ACCESS box is all about, above and to the right. Bottom line: the Wednesday after next, we’ll be ready. We’ll start…

This post first ran November 9, 2011. We’re revisiting it today as I approach another deadline and am reminded of those 10,000 hours. I’m not sure whether Malcolm Gladwell was the first to identify this principle or was simply responsible for popularizing it. But his name is definitely associated with it. The rule says that in order for an individual to master any complex skill, be it brain surgery or playing the cello, she must put in 10,000 hours of focused practice. Since a thousand hours seems to be more or less the maximum we humans can handle in one year,…

[I never do this—pull a post from another site—but this one is so good (and I am in such passionate agreement with it) that I couldn’t resist. [Thank you, Tim Ferriss, from whose blog this came, and thank you, Kevin Ashton, for writing it. Kevin is the co-founder of the MIT Auto-ID Center, which created a global standard system for RFID and other sensors. He also created the Internet of Things. Here’s Kevin’s article:] A Hungarian psychology professor once wrote to famous creators asking them to be interviewed for a book he was writing. One of the most interesting things…

Do you remember the infamous incident from the 80s when David Geffen sued Neil Young for recording music that was “not representative” of Neil Young? I’m thinking of this in connection with recent posts by me and Shawn about commercial-versus-artistic, publishable-versus-unpublishable. Specifically this comment sent in by Susanna Plotnick: If we are working on our own, creating new forms, breaking rules, aren’t we courting ‘unpublishability’? Where do we draw the line between courting publishability and being a hack? An excellent question. But first back to Neil Young: When David Geffen launched Geffen Records in 1980, he paid big bucks to…

Continuing our discussion about the difference between publishable and unpublishable: I said last week that real = unpublishable, and artifical = publishable. Let me qualify that a bit. “Artificial,” in the sense I intend it, does not mean fake, phony, made up. It means crafted with deliberate artistic intent. “Artificial” means employing artifice to achieve the expression of a Deeper Truth. The artist is seeking the real by means of the artificial. Have you ever seen any of Monet’s Water Lilies in person? If you stand back at a viewing distance of, say, twenty feet, the illusion is astonishing. The…

We’ve been talking for the past couple of weeks about making the leap from unpublishable to publishable. [More on “the Foolscap Method” in another week or so.] Some factors we’ve cited are artistic distance, thematic organization, the process of evolution from amateur to professional. Today let’s address the difference between real and artificial. In a nutshell: Real = unpublishable. Artificial = publishable. When I say “artificial,” I mean crafted with deliberate artistic intention so as to produce an emotional, moral, and aesthetic response in the reader. What do I mean by “real?” Real is your journal. Real are your letters…