Entries by Wayne Jones

The Details Make It Real and Interesting

I am working on the part of the book where Sam has just gotten married in the town of Derby, and now he and his wife, Elizabeth – his beloved “Tetty” – are back in Sam’s home town of Lichfield. They need to find a job for him as a teacher. He is 26, well […]

In Terms of “In Terms Of”

I Googled this phrase at 7:14 a.m. on Wednesday, April 21, 2021, and there were 517,000,000 hits. It’s a phrase or word like any other in English in that its meaning and use have changed over time. It’s also a phrase that I resolutely never use in my writing, not because I object to change […]

Sam and the Ossian Fraud

I’ve been writing since I was about 15 (that was the mid-1970s). Three things I remember working on at that time were a novel (unfinished), at least one short story, and poems (execrable and happily lost for eternity). When I think of the fiction, it often reminds me of the old saw about writing, that […]

Editing Is Not Just Typos

As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, for two solid years exactly Sam wrote a series of essays called The Rambler, which he published twice a week, one on Tuesday and one on Saturday. He started on March 20, 1750, and ended with number 208 on March 14, 1752. These were also not brief little […]

Woke

Some read for style, and some for argument: one has little care about the sentiment, he observes only how it is expressed; another regards not the conclusion, but is diligent to mark how it is inferred: they read for other purposes than the attainment of practical knowledge; and are no more likely to grow wise […]

Did I Miss Anything?

One of the challenges and pleasures of writing a biography of a person about whom so much has already been written by so many other people is this: did I miss anything? You don’t want to be the proud author of a new biography of, say, Shakespeare for example, and when the thing is published […]

Customer Service and Sam

The concept and practice of customer service existed in 18th-century London, but the term itself wasn’t used until 1922, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which quotes the automotive section of the Washington Post for April 16: Joseph N. (‘Joe’) Thompson, in the accessory business, as well as distributor for Mason tires, a great stickler […]

The Choice of Life

This is the first of my effort to increase the frequency of this blog from a couple of times a month to weekly, usually and hopefully on Fridays. After it occurred to me to do this in an email exchange with my friend Oscar last week, I later thought of two very different authors: Jean-Paul […]

Sam and Women

I had an email chat this week with another writer (a woman) who reminded me of one of Sam’s most famous and infamous utterances, in a conversation with Boswell: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done […]