Speaking of writing, here's a great piece by Terry Teachout from his arts blog About Last Night. He describes the hard craft of writing a 40,000 word biography of George Balanchine.

Quote Worth Clipping:

"It didn’t surprise me that I had to leave so many things out. What surprised me was how much I was able to put in, and how many of the techniques I used in writing The Skeptic [his biography of H.L. Mencken] were equally useful in writing All in the Dances. Both books are built around scenes and portraits, though most of the "scenes" in All in the Dances deal not with events in Balanchine’s life but with the premieres of the Balanchine ballets I singled out for description and criticism. Conversely, I used the portraits—of Serge Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, Lincoln Kirstein, Jerome Robbins, Tanaquil Le Clercq, and Suzanne Farrell, the six most important people in Balanchine’s life—to keep the narrative moving forward."

Great stuff. You can see inside the craft of writing by reading the whole thing.