He looked at my screen, saw the first draft of an e-mail I'd been penning, and shook his head. It wasn't pretty. It didn't read well. The message that should have been communicated within the first line was placed below another eight lines of filler. And to think I'd been working on this for the... Continue Reading →
How to write shorter, better e-mails
Each time I complete writing a lengthy e-mail, I save it in my drafts and let it sit there for a while (sometimes, just a minute or two would do). Then, returning to it, I look at it through the eyes of my recipient, and imagine how I’d read it if I had only ten... Continue Reading →
On the need to write, to write.
Words excite me. Really, they do. The prospect of writing something good tantalises me like the prospect of having good sex. My pupils enlarge; my breathing gets shallower; my hands get all balmy. But as much as I love to write, I haven't been writing lately. Probably because I've been finding that there's hardly anything... Continue Reading →
Happiness Doesn’t Lead to New Writing
I've always felt that my best pieces of writing were written in times of melancholy, sadness, or anger -- generally negative feelings you'd want to avoid. During the better times, those good but not great times, writing doesn't come quite as readily. Perhaps it's because life keeps you satiated with itself, and writing just isn't... Continue Reading →
Bing Donn Lee’s Star
You ask yourself if having a domain name, specifically edonn.com, actually creates more stress than necessary. Didn’t you just go to bing.com to do a search on "donn lee" realise that it didn’t contain any results linking to your webpage? And didn't this little thing cause you to start feeling a little flustered, a little... Continue Reading →
Being Close to Greatness
A couple of days back I read a newspaper article in the Straits Times describing the way Liverpool beat Real Madrid 4-0 in the UEFA Champions League. Besides the hugely unexpected scoreline, another thing about that article had caught my eye: the clever way the writer praised the performance of one player while lambasting the... Continue Reading →
Donn, fragments 