becoming a better writer

In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind . It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole... See more

“I wish I could observe life like Maggie Nelson,” I said to my manager.

“You can,” he replied. “I think reading literature makes one much more attentive. I go from ‘writing op-eds about who is good and who is bad’ to ‘writing vignettes about what's amusing, unusual, or thematically resonant’ in my head. It's like, ‘What genre do I want my internal ... See more

My prose has tightened, the excess trimmed. Information efficiency is paramount. I write like the 12 dollar desk salad, the bar that packs 20 grams of protein and plastic into one 200-calorie brick. But good writing, like a good meal, needs fat. It should indulge readers, is meant to be chewed and enjoyed, affording a generous escape from the prosa... See more

But busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge. Long runs, hot showers, commutes that don’t involve harried Slack messages and listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Sitting at the edge of a dock, listening to the o... See more

When All Else Fails, Go to the Movies

“It’s what I call the Don Draper Principle,” says Abbott, “because he always did that on Mad Men . I tend to see something, usually horror, something that completely demands my attention and is very big and spectacle-oriented, because it can knock me out of what I’m thinking about in a good way. Or sometimes it... See more

Do Your Homework

“I might print out like 100 articles from LexisNexis,” says Attica Locke , who has written a series of novels set in Texas. “As I read them, I began to understand what matters to this community, what’s interesting about this community, what has been a problem in this community, and somehow the crime that this thing is going to be c... See more

A day job puts you in the path of other human beings. Learn from them, steal from them. I’ve tried to take jobs where I can learn things that I can use in my work later—my library job taught me how to do research, my Web design job taught me how to build websites, and my copywriting job taught me how to sell things with words.