During a lonely year, I entangled myself with horse racing gamblers, renegade aquarium attendants, wizened hostel dwellers, and hundreds of friendly randos.
The cultural meaning of strangers tends to be fear-oriented: they are shadowy and dangerous. That’s often with good reason, but it’s also reductive. “Strangers” is really just a shorthand for “everyone else.” That’s a pretty wide-ranging category, to preposterously understate it! …
Head straight for the origin story.
This is not a complicated “hack” or “trick,” and if anything, is very low-hanging fruit. But even so, it’s fruit that so often goes unplucked, in my experience! …
A stable of trusted personal readers is the bedrock of writing that resonates
When you write, you need readers who are on the front lines with you: The ones who read your writing before it’s even submitted. They may offer key developmental notes, suggest better word choices, cover your pages in red ink, or act as cheerleaders, helping you build confidence as you…
A tiny piece of nonfiction that was in an early draft of my book.
We were stuffing insulation, but now we’re breaking for lunch. My boss assigns everyone a task: my task is to cut up the tomato. It is one of the few colorful things in a dust-filled house, with transparent sheets hung up in almost every room. As everyone disperses, I am…
A quick, revealing thought experiment.
Someone suggested that it would be interesting if I hosted a reading and invited the 60+ strangers I’d written about in my book, No One You Know, which collects charged and poetic interactions with mostly random people. I do think that would be fascinating, moving, awkward, and surreal, though also…
I was so consumed by this frame of mind, I wrote a book about it. Here’s what I would pass along to others feeling out of place.
It began with a breakup. I moved somewhere where I barely knew anyone. My roommate was out every night doing standup comedy, and spent most of his time at his girlfriend’s apartment anyway. Constant first dates made it feel like I was always introducing myself. I missed people who knew…
There’s a little-known resource that makes it easier for writers to decode rejection letters.
Thank you so much for sending us XXXXXX. This time, however, we’re saying no, but we wish you the best of luck with your piece.
While we are grateful to have had the opportunity to read your work, we’re sorry to say it isn’t a good fit for us at…
It can shine a light on many different aspects of yourself.
I was looking for an email I’d started but hadn’t finished, when my eye caught on an array of compelling fragments along the various rows of unsent e-missives.
“I was hurled into the maw of hell at the age…
It offers detailed narrative X-rays for books, movies, and TV
One way to level up as a storyteller or writer is by teaching yourself to be a narrative plumber. It starts by being more active while you read. Dog-ear or highlight when something you read strikes you, then try to understand why. Is it just the language or did the…
Lessons from my slow return to the page after a long layoff.
At first, I described it as a “rut.” Something I could shake off soon enough. But disturbingly, months of not making time to write turned into years. One problem was that I did copywriting and magazine editing for my day job, so I often felt uninspired to do more writing…
