{"id":261816,"date":"2026-07-13T18:37:03","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T15:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/1kitap1.com\/en\/good-writing-neal-allen-anne-lamott-1\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T18:37:03","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T15:37:03","slug":"good-writing-neal-allen-anne-lamott-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1kitap1.com\/en\/good-writing-neal-allen-anne-lamott-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Writing – Neal Allen Anne Lamott (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I mean\u2014whoa, dude! (By the way, while we\u2019re on the subject of metaphors, my father described Beethoven\u2019s Fifth Symphony as metaphor upon metaphor. Duh duh duh duh. Duh duh duh duh: Life is pounding on the door and then barges in with all the joy and hardship, darkness and light, life and death and new life.)<\/p>\n

Over and over, every rule of Neal\u2019s is about creating better sentences, cleaner and richer at the same time. A successful metaphor\u2014\u201clove is a rose bush, beautiful and prickly and ephemeral\u201d\u2014enhances its environment, as does taking out a forced one. OceanofPDF.com Twist Clich\u00e9s We already think in clich\u00e9s; you owe it to your reader\u2019s search for novelty to remove or deconstruct your hackneyed phrases.<\/p>\n

USE CLICH\u00c9S TO YOUR HEART\u2019S desire, but only if you twist them until they bleed. We\u2019re pattern seekers, us humans, and that means that our ideas\u2014our spoken words\u2014rest on hackneyed ideas that are recombined in new ways. Clich\u00e9s \u2018R\u2019 us. We\u2019re spitting out old thoughts all day long. Writers think like everyone else. We have an alphabet, and we also have a canon of idiomatic shortcuts to abstract ideas\u2014adages and stale phrases. (So do musicians. How many times have you heard a jazz soloist blurt out a phrase from a childhood ditty?)<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t be scared to write the first thing that comes into your head, which is often a clich\u00e9. Later you can exchange it for all-new verbiage. But you might also use the clich\u00e9 as a starting point and create a zinger out of it, like a comedian taking a mundane experience and throwing in an unexpected variable, getting a laugh.<\/p>\n

I might first think, \u201cShe was good as gold.\u201d By the time I\u2019ve finished creating the character, the line has changed to \u201cShe was good as brass, barely.\u201d A year or so into my newspaper career I was assigned the storm story. Writing about snowstorms in upstate New York is like writing about waves in Waikiki Beach or pit crews at Talladega. But a good-sized blizzard, no matter how much it resembles every other good-sized blizzard, must be placed on the front page.<\/p>\n

Every reader expects it; the storm is what everyone is talking about, so it must be news.<\/p>\n

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Somehow: Thoughts on Love Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage Almost Everything: Notes on Hope Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son\u2019s First Son (with Sam Lamott) Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son\u2019s First Year FICTION Imperfect Birds Blue Shoe Crooked Little Heart All New People Joe Jones Rosie Hard Laughter OceanofPDF.com OceanofPDF.com an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019 penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Neal Allen, Anne Lamott Penguin Random House values and supports copyright.<\/p>\n

Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. Please note that no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. Avery with colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC Cover design: Jess Morphew Book design by Ashley Tucker, adapted for ebook The excerpt on this page, by R.<\/p>\n

W. Apple Jr., is from The New York Times. \u00a9 1981 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license. The stanza on this page is from the poem \u201cRipples on the Surface\u201d from No Nature by Gary Snyder, copyright \u00a9 1992 by Gary Snyder. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.<\/p>\n

All rights reserved. The stanza on this page is from the poem \u201cAnnabel Lee\u201d by Edgar Allan Poe, 1849. The excerpt on this page is from The Overcoat, by Nikolai Gogol, translated by Constance Garnett, 1923. The lyric on this page is from the song \u201cI\u2019m So Lonesome I Could Cry,\u201d written and first recorded by Hank Williams in 1949.<\/p>\n

The excerpt on this page is from Conjugating Hindi by Ishmael Reed. Dalkey Archive Press, 2018. An excerpt on this page is from the story \u201cNights in the Garden of Spain\u201d in Women in Their Beds by Gina Berriault. Counterpoint, 2017. An excerpt on this page is from Less by Andrew Sean Greer. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.<\/em><\/p>\n

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