Writing is a hard business. Finding the right words, and making sure their meaning and their sound and their rhythm all merge properly on the page, has been a head-banger since people were scratching on cave walls. Those of us who write stories we make up have one special set of problems, and those who try to research and write the world’s literal truth have another. This blog will be my attempt to share what I’ve learned, in almost three decades as a reporter and writer, what I’ve learned about gathering and organizing information, and then writing it down as clearly as possible.

    I’m going to try to do something else as well: discuss how to make a living as a writer. Because as much as writing is a literary act, it’s a mercenary one as well. If we don’t get paid -- if we can’t pay the rent and buy groceries and keep the lights on -- it doesn’t matter how brilliant we are as wordsmiths. It’s the dirty little secret of the literary life: Words are to writers what shoes are to cobblers. We have to produce enough of them, and sell them at a good enough price, to stay in business. It isn’t easy.

    My wife, Margaret, and I both started out as newspaper reporters. We have been full-time freelance writers, with no other income, since 1987. We don’t live large, but we live on our writing income, and have rarely had to resort to writing stuff we don’t want to write. We’ve been lucky. But we’ve also been careful never to forget that alongside the responsibility we have to write the truth and inspire with our words is the equally important requirement to make a buck so we can keep writing. We’ve watched a lot of freelancers fail over the past twenty-odd years, and usually it has been not because they failed at the former, but because they lifted the eye from the latter.