The Paragraph Factory
Welcome to The Paragraph Factory! We'll start this live chat at 3 p.m.
We're informal here, and while some of us refer to the entire newsroom here as the Paragraph Factory, for the moment we're just gathered around the water cooler to talk about the art and craft of writing. I'm Mike Vogel, and I've been earning a living as a writer for about four decades now -- newspaper and magazine articles, a handful of books, that sort of thing. And there's something genetic about that, because my daughter Charity has been doing the same thing for about 10 years -- newspaper work here and at the Boston Globe, a play, some book projects. We blame my father, who was a printer by trade. Ink got in the blood.
Anyway, if interest warrants we'll make this a regularly scheduled thing. We're not here to discuss issues (there are plenty of places in this paper's blog and print pages for that). We're in the "Matters of Opinion" space because that's a part of my domain as editorial page editor, but this is about writing.
Flaubert wrote that humans yearn to make music that melts the stars, but wind up playing tunes on cracked kettles for bears to dance to. Let's talk about melting stars.
