An Alien on the Hunt for the Ineffable Sauce of Good Writing

spent those years writing for someone else: an editor I hadn’t met yet, a projection of literary authority I created in my mind. I was writing pieces that I hoped sounded like publishable stories, trying to guess what readers would want, and what editors thought was important. In the process, I’d forgotten what made me want to be a writer in the fi

... See more

My friend back in the day claimed that he wanted to be a writer with all his heart, but it turns out he didn’t want to eat the shit sandwich that comes along with that pursuit. He loved writing, sure, but he didn’t love it enough to endure the ignominy of not getting the results he wanted, when he wanted them. He didn’t want to work so hard at anyt

... See more

You can figure out the ways you’re likely to screw up as a writer, and maybe screw up a little better. Plus you might get to glimpse the ways that your particular brain is a little wonky at turning blobs of information and sensory detail into a smooth narrative, which in turn can help you troubleshoot when the real world gets glitchy. (Is it your b

... See more

Taste requires originality. It invokes an aspirational authenticity. Writer George Saunders calls this “achieving the iconic space,” and it’s what he’s after when he meets his creative writing students. “They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space” — the place from ... See more

Even now, when I’m lucky enough to be able to write exactly what I want to write with very few external constraints, writing often feels difficult for me in the same way it did when I was pumping out listicles — slow, sticky, clunky, painful, humiliating. I wonder if this, too, is part of the appeal of AI: it is so often humiliating to push up agai... See more