In defiance of New Year’s resolutions, which oftentimes stem from the idea that a life must be fundamentally changed in order to improve, I like to use this time of year to wonder how I might rededicate myself to some meaningful aspect of my life. This approach works even better … [Read more...]

Whether you’re the type of writer who won’t begin a project until you’ve drawn up several spreadsheets and have exhausted every possible corner of research as well as your local librarian, or you prefer to tackle the work in Thurber-esque fashion, happily puttering ahead as long … [Read more...]

Most people come to writing because they have a flirting acquaintance with the many rewards it has to offer. Perhaps they have produced the occasional essay or story that met with widespread approval, or have been pleasantly daydreaming about writing the great American novel, or … [Read more...]

One of my favorite sayings is that a book is not finished until it is read. I find so many helpful insights woven into this statement. First, it reminds me that all this toiling I’m doing behind closed doors is not because I’m antisocial and unwell, but because I’m willing to go … [Read more...]

The longer you hang around writers, the weirder the conversation gets. Usually, this is a good thing, as long as alcohol isn’t involved. If alcohol is involved, gird your loins and take notes. But when the conversation is good, it is, at the very least, though provoking. … [Read more...]

One of the great frustrations any artist faces is measuring progress. As if it weren’t hard enough to enter into work that is, by its very nature, inventive, and therefore not designed to live up to any clear benchmarks, more often than not, the effort we put into our work is not … [Read more...]

For more than two decades, I lingered in this terrible writer’s limbo of knowing I wanted to write and having no idea what to write about. I’d turn out lengthy, rich, prose pieces with no anchor or sense of story, and feel as if I’d just produced the literary equivalent of … [Read more...]

One of the most confounding aspects of writing is how hard it can be to just get started. We finally finish playing whack-a-mole with all the usual demands on our time, manage to squirrel away an hour or two to ourselves, only to sit down, take a deep breath, turn on the … [Read more...]

One of the biggest challenges of writing fiction is how liberating it can be. At the outset, it can feel exhilarating to spin an entirely fabricated world of your own design, but most writers don’t get very far before they begin to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of … [Read more...]

Here’s one of the things they don’t tell you in writing class: It's next-to-impossible to engage in any kind of substantive revision without experience more than your share of existential despair. I don’t care how well the work is coming along. If it will stand up to a heavy … [Read more...]