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 something, anything, about me. I missed seeing close friends in person instead of a phone call merely approximating an interaction. I missed intimacy to the point that I began being dramatically more responsive up to random strangers. I wrote in a journal at the time that loneliness is a disease.
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When I let small talk with strangers spiral into something deeper, it became a book about memorable interactions. Here’s what I learned.
The best conversations crack us open. They leave us tender and reeling, alive again with possibility, mesmerized by the uncanny nature of things. When you really “get there” with someone, you reach what my friend once referred to as the wilderness. You may not know where you are anymore, but you know it’s a place of mystery and beauty. You know you want to keep going. I felt this most acutely a few years ago when I kept having unexpected interactions with strangers. I wrote a book about those experiences — No One You Know, which is very much a…
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 this time.
Thank you for sending us XXXXXX. We appreciate the chance to read it. Unfortunately, the piece is not for us.
Rejection sucks. It seems to always slither into my inbox at inopportune times, souring my mood. While it’s an inevitable reality for most writers, I’ve found it valuable…
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 of 15.”
“I’m imagining you getting out your bow and arrow…”
“Since we came with our hay and our wine and our horse…”
I’d never spent much or any time, really, looking in my “drafts” folder so I was taken aback to notice it had a few hundred half-finished messages…
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 pacing speed up? Maybe a punchy quote worked as a surprise kicker after a long description? Did the author play with your expectations in a skillful way? Underlying all these types of inquiries is one operative question: “What is the writer doing here?”
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 in my slivers of free time, even the creative and personal kind which I cared about most. Another issue was that I felt held hostage by the emotional toll of submitting my book over a period of years. It was hard to start something new — even something small—when my…
A line from a novel helped settle my unease about once-close connections that have gone cold
Once upon a time, we were deeply ingrained in each other’s lives. We met up for dinners or movies or just to ride the rhythm of our good time, toasting to our own riff on “nature’s masterpiece,” as Emerson described friendship. We walked and wrote and called and felt like we were getting closer and closer. We went on road trips, chose conversation over sleep, got each other out of jams. We told each other “I love you,” and we meant it. We absorbed each other’s sadnesses and made them more bearable. We were there at pivotal moments. We coded…
An old-school form of journaling helped lead to my book about interactions, strangers, and memory.
When I feel imprisoned by the clenched, corporate-souled, Google-calendared demand for never-ending productivities and supposedly uber-practical hurtling toward more and newly-sprouted results, with takeaways as the only high meaning, I often slip out a surprising trapdoor, one with a funny name: the zibaldone. Also known as a common-place book, it was initially used by 14th century Venetian merchants as a wild notebook that haphazardly combined “a heap of things” including memorable encounters, aphorisms, recipes, business notations, descriptions of cloud formations, and any other (fleetingly) noteworthy ephemera. It’s not a scrapbook with stubs and photos and cherished memories, but rather a…
Level up your daily interactions with strategies from ‘My Dinner With Andre” to ‘Adaptation’
Considering how inherent it is to everyday life, conversation is an under discussed art. But being more thoughtful about how we talk to each other can yield powerful connections.
I thought a lot about conversation when writing my memoir, No One You Know, which revolves around my organic interactions with strangers. Sometimes, those interactions were stimulating, sometimes a drag, and occasionally, they were revelatory. When I think about what makes a fruitful conversation, besides drawing on experience, it’s been useful to consult a resource hiding in plain sight: movies. I’ve plumbed some of my favorites for enlightening clips and lessons…
After a string of perplexing encounters, I was surprised at the lofty themes that kept emerging.
My memoir, No One You Know, details a time that I was far from friends and reeling from a breakup, so I noticed myself becoming much more open to strangers like dental hygienists and drifters and taxi drivers. Starved of intimacy and connection, I was also going on a lot of dates, another frontier of my life suddenly crowded with people I didn’t know at all, as I tried to get over the end of a relationship that spanned many years and places. Dating then was often exhausting—so many people would flake or cancel or we just wouldn’t be a…
