MyWritersReview Research on writers, writing craft, and editorial reviews

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Books & AuthorsOctober 11, 202613 min

Anne Lamott's 'Bird by Bird' still guides writers today

How one anxiety-riddled writing instructor turned kitchen-table advice into a literacy guide read by presidents and prisoners, spawning thirty years of 'just begin' culture.

The night before the report was due, Anne Lamott's ten-year-old brother sat at the kitchen table in the family's cabin, surrounded by paper and unopened books about birds, close to tears and overwhelmed by the size of the job ahead. He had been given three months. He had not started. This is the origin story of one of the most influential writing guides of the last three decades a book that would sell over a million copies, be referenced in TikToks and presidential speeches, and become shorthand for a particular...

Books & AuthorsOctober 1, 202610 min

Artists embrace 'Untitled' to provoke and resist labels

From a viral Los Angeles rock band to a Brooklyn music app to a 25-year-old entertainment company, the word 'Untitled' keeps appearing where you'd expect a name. Here's what that choice actually means.

The Night the Band Didn't Announce Itself November 2025. A garage in West Los Angeles. The kind of space where the walls still smell like paint and the backyard is just dirt and string lights. A crowd of maybe forty people has squeezed in, phones raised, not for likes but because the sound pouring out of a borrowed amplifier is the kind of sound that makes you forget you're standing in someone's driveway. The band onstage doesn't have a name. Or rather, they've chosen not to give themselves one yet. They're called...

Books & AuthorsOctober 1, 202610 min

Artists embrace anonymity and what it means for their work

A strategic exploration of how the deliberate choice to leave work unnamed has shaped art, music, design, and culture and what it reveals about the creative process.

Why 'Untitled' Is One of the Most Deliberate Choices a Creator Can Make In the catalog of a major museum, between entries for named works, there is a quiet recurring presence. It appears not as absence but as declaration. The word sits where a title should be: Untitled. It is not a placeholder. It is the title. This choice to leave a work unnamed is among the most studied and discussed decisions in creative practice. From Jean-Michel Basquiat's Untitled (1982) skull painting to Félix González-Torres's "Untitled"...

Books & AuthorsOctober 1, 202616 min

AI's subtle lies are eroding trust in chatbots

Why the most confident AI outputs can be the most misleading and what the surprising parallel to education standards reveals about building better verification.

The Lawyer, the Citation, and the Machine That Never Existed Late in the evening, a junior attorney at a mid-sized firm ran a complex contract clause through a large language model. The output returned in polished, confident legal prose a citation to a 1998 Delaware Chancery Court ruling that seemed directly on point. The language was impeccable. The syntax was authoritative. The attorney felt reassured. There was only one problem: the case did not exist. There was no 1998 Delaware Chancery Court ruling matching...

Books & AuthorsSeptember 14, 202614 min

Donald Maass's writing method still shapes novels after a decade

From 21,000 yearly queries to breakout success the story behind the agent who stopped fuming over manuscript mistakes and started teaching writers how to be extraordinary.

Every October, 250 query letters land in Donald Maass's inbox. Across his agency, the number climbs to roughly 1,750 per month, or 21,000 per year. For three decades, Maass has read that deluge not as an academic studying fiction, not as a writing instructor sharing theory, but as a working literary agent who needed to know, every single day, which manuscripts could be sold. That distinction matters. Maass did not arrive at his writing methodology from workshops or creative writing programs. He arrived there from...

Books & AuthorsSeptember 13, 202612 min

Pat Schneider and the Quiet Revolution of the Amherst Writers & Artists Method

How a poet who grew up in tenements built a non-hierarchical writing workshop that has quietly reshaped how thousands of people around the world encounter their own voices.

The Room Where It Began In a housing project in Chicopee, Massachusetts, in the late 1970s, a woman named Pat Schneider began sitting down with a group of neighbors and writing. Not to publish. Not to perform. Just to write together, in the same room, at the same time, with the same quiet permission to say what was true. Schneider was not there as a teacher. She was there as a facilitator. She brought prompts. She wrote alongside the women who showed up. And she listened. What grew from those sessions would become...

Books & AuthorsSeptember 8, 202615 min

Martha Wells' Murderbot sprung from a life writing tech manuals

Before Murderbot, Martha Wells wrote technical documentation for nine years at Texas A&M's Ocean Drilling Program. What she learned there and who she was while learning it changed science fiction's inner life.

A security unit, or “SecUnit,” is a cyborg construct typically designed for protection and lacking in independent agency but Martha Wells's Murderbot is a groundbreaking exception. These characters, initially appearing in a series of novellas beginning in 2017, explore the complexities of autonomy, identity, and even humanity through the lens of artificial intelligence. As AI rapidly develops and integrates into daily life, Murderbot's struggle for self-determination resonates with increasing urgency and provides...

Books & AuthorsSeptember 5, 202611 min

McPhee's meticulous system defined modern narrative nonfiction

Six decades of New Yorker writing, one picnic-table breakdown, and a four-stage method that turns a silo of research into a story that moves.

Ever wondered how to turn complex subjects into compelling stories? For John McPhee, a pioneer of narrative nonfiction, even *starting* proved a monumental challenge - he once spent two weeks paralyzed at his picnic table, unable to write a single word. This struggle ultimately led him to develop a now-famous, meticulously detailed system for research and writing that would redefine the genre. The subject was the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. He had spent roughly eight months driving down from Princeton day...

Books & AuthorsSeptember 4, 202614 min

Dorothea Brande's book unlocks writing's hidden power

In 1934, a Chicago-born writer and editor published a guide that refused to treat creativity as magic and generations of American writers have been grateful ever since.

Do you long to write, yet find yourself staring at a blank page, convinced your ideas aren't good enough? For nearly a century, countless aspiring writers have wrestled with this frustrating paralysis, a sense of being blocked before they even begin. In 1934, Dorothea Brande offered a solution, publishing a guide to unlock the creative process and finally get words flowing. Brande's book, Becoming a Writer , published that year by Harcourt, Brace and Company, did something unusual in its era. more than offering...

Books & AuthorsAugust 31, 202613 min

AI code rankings mislead performance doesn't equal progress

As top AI models cluster within a narrow score band on public benchmarks, a quiet contrarian movement is asking whether the industry is measuring what actually matters and building something more honest in its place.

The fluorescent-lit room at a mid-sized software consultancy in early 2026 looked like any other sprint planning session. The team had just integrated a frontier AI coding assistant into their development workflow, citing benchmark scores that placed the model well above 70% on industry-standard evaluations. By mid-quarter, they had quietly disabled the integration. Not because the tool was useless but because it kept introducing subtle bugs that passed their own test suites and made it past code review, only to...

Books & AuthorsJuly 25, 202612 min

Mike Rowe and the Art of Finding What Nobody Else Sees

The Dirty Jobs host returns to television with a show built on a simple idea from his podcast: every famous person has a story you probably don't know and those stories reveal more than the headlines ever could.

A Different Take on the People You Thought You Knew There is a moment near the end of every episode of The Story Behind the Story when Mike Rowe stops talking and lets someone else take over. The expert arrives. The perspective shifts. And suddenly, the story you've been watching for twenty minutes reveals itself as only the surface of something much larger. Code breakers turn out to be the hinge points of history. A blown glass paperweight becomes a vehicle for grief. A woman losing her hair leads to a cultural...

Books & AuthorsJuly 22, 202614 min

Dwight Garner finds clarity in the single sentence

How a New York Times book critic who spent a decade editing before he ever reviewed built a singular voice by treating every sentence as a small, irreducible act of attention.

Dwight Garner's writing, particularly in his 2023 memoir *The Upstairs Delicatessen*, is defined by a rare and unflinching honesty that extends to both the books he discusses and his own lived experience. Garner dissects subjects from literature to his childhood with a clinical yet affectionate eye, refusing to shy away from uncomfortable truths. This directness, evident in sentences like his description of himself as a boy (“a soft kid, inclined toward embonpoint...”), is the key to his critical clarity and...

Books & AuthorsJuly 21, 202611 min

Burroway's writing textbook shaped a generation of American writers

For over four decades, Writing Fiction has shaped how thousands of American writers learn their craft. Here's the story behind the book and the woman who became required reading for a generation.

There is a copy of Writing Fiction on the desk of nearly every MFA student in America. It sits beside laptops, manuscript pages, and coffee rings in offices from Iowa City to Ann Arbor, from Austin to Brooklyn. It has been there, in one edition or another, since 1982. That longevity is not accidental. Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft has become something rare in American literary education: a genuine backbone. Not a supplement. Not a suggested reading. The actual structural support...

Books & AuthorsJuly 21, 202611 min

Iowa workshop birthed American literary voice

How a 1936 gathering of poets and fiction writers in Iowa City became the prototype for more than 300 writing programs across the country and shaped the way we teach storytelling today.

There is a photograph from 1959 that captures something harder to see in person. In it, Robert Frost stands at a podium, and beside him, slightly younger, slightly more restless in his stance, is Paul Engle the man who had already spent nearly two decades shaping what would become the most influential creative writing program in the world. Students cluster around them in what looks like a quonset hut, the kind of temporary structure that housed the Workshop for years before it found a permanent home. Nobody in the...

Books & AuthorsJuly 21, 202613 min

Orson Scott Card's MICE reveals story structure secrets

A practical breakdown of how Orson Scott Card's four-element story framework Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event helps writers diagnose where their narratives begin, end, and falter.

The Four Questions Every Story Asks Some frameworks arrive fully formed. Others evolve quietly, passed from teacher to student, podcast episode to podcast episode, until they become embedded in the culture of craft. The MICE Quotient belongs to the second category. It began as an observation in two books by Orson Scott Card How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy and Character and Viewpoint and over two decades it has quietly become one of the most practical diagnostic tools available to working writers. The name...

Books & AuthorsJuly 18, 202612 min

The Case Against Calling Fractional Executives a Cost Play

The conversation around fractional leadership keeps circling the same talking point. A closer look reveals what companies are actually buying and why that distinction changes everything.

The email landed in the founder's inbox on a Tuesday afternoon, somewhere between a board deck and a product sprint. Her business had crossed the threshold where operational complexity was outpacing her ability to manage it alone. The advice she'd received from peers was predictable: hire a fractional executive. It would be cheaper than a full-time CFO, they'd said. More flexible. Easier to manage. Six months later, the engagement had ended. The relationship had never found its rhythm. The fractional CFO had...

Books & AuthorsJuly 18, 20268 min

How Strunk & White Became the Writing Compass a Generation of Writers Still Follows

The Elements of Style began as a professor's private guide for his Cornell students. Six decades later, it remains the scouting manual of American prose and its story holds quiet lessons about clarity, brevity, and what endures.

A Professor's Private Guide, Circa 1918 At Cornell University, a professor of English named William Strunk Jr. was tired of watching his students drown in advice. He wanted something lean. Something they could actually carry with them into a newsroom, a cubicle, a quiet desk at home. So in 1918, Strunk put together some guidelines privately, for his students and called it The Elements of Style . It was 43 pages. Harcourt published an expanded version in 1920. That was 52 pages. The rest, as they say, is publishing...

Books & AuthorsJuly 13, 20269 min

Archery and firearms mastering the perfect takedown

A close look at how two-piece takedown construction brings portability, customization, and practical craftsmanship to bows and firearms alike.

Most assume that the true measure of a weapon lies in its assembled power, its immediate readiness. But a growing trend among both archers and firearms enthusiasts prioritizes something different: deliberate disassembly. This “takedown” principle designing tools to efficiently break down and rebuild isn't about fragility; it's reshaping how people relate to their equipment, fostering deeper understanding, customization, and enduring connection. The term itself carries weight. A takedown is not merely a...

Books & AuthorsJuly 10, 202612 min

STRING database reveals protein interactions key to disease

How a freely available network tool turns millions of protein interactions into a map researchers, writers, and curious readers can actually use.

There is a moment in every research project when a scientist or a writer trying to understand one needs to ask a deceptively simple question: which proteins talk to each other inside a living cell? The answer is not simple at all. Proteins do not operate in isolation. They form webs of interaction, passing signals, triggering cascades, building structures, and responding to threats. Understanding those conversations is the work of molecular biology. Mapping them at scale is the work of a database called STRING....

Books & AuthorsJuly 7, 202612 min

Ingermanson's plotting method reshapes novel writing with geometry

From a physicist's dissertation habits to a method millions of writers have tried, the Snowflake Method turns the terrifying blank page into something you can watch grow.

Over 80% of novels never reach completion, according to industry estimates, but one method is gaining traction among authors seeking to overcome this daunting statistic. Randy Ingermanson's plotting technique, rooted in the principles of geometry and structural engineering, offers a surprisingly logical approach to navigating the complexities of novel writing. Rather than facing a blank page with limitless possibilities, Ingermanson proposes beginning with a single, carefully crafted sentence. Not a paragraph. Not...

Books & AuthorsJuly 5, 20269 min

Patricia Mitchell's annotated reviews built HandEye's devoted readership

An editorial director, a magazine, and a reader culture built word by word tracing how one publication turned slow reading into its editorial backbone.

How do you build a devoted readership in an era of infinite scroll? Patricia Mitchell found the answer by prioritizing slow, intentional attention over algorithmic speed. This editorial philosophy became the foundation of HandEye magazine. This is the story of how Patricia L. Mitchell, through HandEye Magazine, built a cult following around what has come to be called the Slow Reading Protocol a practice and an editorial philosophy that asks readers to linger, annotate, and discuss fiction with the same rigor once...

Books & AuthorsJune 28, 202612 min

Snyder's beat sheet now rules book plots

It started as Hollywood advice for selling screenplays. Two decades later, the 15-beat method Blake Snyder created in 2005 has become one of the most widely taught story frameworks in novel writing too and the path tells us something useful about how storytelling tools travel.

Conventional wisdom holds that compelling stories hinge on relatable characters making selfless choices but plot structures, not emotional resonance, are now the driving force behind bestselling novels. While a heroic return to save a cat once defined cinematic empathy, today's authors are increasingly guided by Blake Snyder's “beat sheet,” a formulaic framework originally designed for screenwriting. This shift reveals a surprising trend: the prioritization of predictable plot points over character-driven...

Food & LifestyleJune 26, 202614 min

Manlius food trucks reveal a surprising community heart

How one Thursday evening in July distills the entire ethos of community food culture into a three-hour playbook for organizers, vendors, and neighbors who keep showing up.

The Unconventional Wisdom About Food Truck Gatherings Most people think the point of a food truck rally is the food. That is the consensus: food trucks roll up, people line up, someone eats a taco, everyone goes home happy. Transaction complete. It is a tidy, appetizing story and it is wrong, or at least incomplete, in ways that matter if you are the kind of reader who shows up to Liberty Square on a Thursday evening not just to eat but to understand why a community keeps choosing to gather around a parking lot....

Books & AuthorsJune 26, 202612 min

New Domain Registrations Fuel Agency Lead Gold Rush

Every day, more than 200,000 new domains appear on the internet each one a business just born online. Here's how agencies are turning that daily flood into a prospecting goldmine.

The surge in new domain registrations over 200,000 daily as of mid-2026 is creating a massive lead gold rush for digital marketing agencies. Platforms like NewlyRegisteredDomains.io confirm this unprecedented volume, revealing a constant influx of new businesses establishing an online presence without existing digital support. This represents a significant opportunity for agencies to acquire clients early in their online journeys. For agencies selling digital services SEO, web development, content creation,...

Books & AuthorsJune 26, 20268 min

The Query Letter System How Modern Writers Navigate Literary Agent Submissions

From the mechanics of a strong pitch to the tools that track every send, a look at how the query letter framework serves writers seeking representation.

There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a writer's desk after the manuscript is finished. The months or years of drafting are behind you. The story exists. And now begins the next phase: finding someone who can carry it forward. For most fiction and memoir writers without industry connections, that path runs through a query letter a brief, carefully constructed pitch sent to literary agents. The query letter is not simply a cover note. It is a demonstration of craft compressed into a few hundred...