This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Once I called Bill after what had been months of overlapping houseguests and told him I wanted to check into a fancy hotel by myself for a week and never leave the property. “Brilliant!” he said. “I love it.” And so I took up residence at the Hotel Bel-Air. The resulting piece, “Do Not Disturb,” was one that no other magazine would have assigned, a

my ear to the usefulness and uselessness of other people’s opinions. An essential element of being a writer is learning whom to listen to and whom to ignore where your work is concerned.

Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say.

(Interested in being a better writer? Go buy yourself a copy of The Collected Stories by Grace Paley.)

My father’s presents were always the saddest because they were so consistently wrong. He sent me clothes I never liked and dolls that were big and artistic and creepy. The year I very much wanted a pair of boot roller skates, he got me a pair in black. At recess, all the girls skated around the convent parking lot wearing white boot skates. I was d

the more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.

The quality of a life is defined not by its length, but by its depth, its actions and achievements. It is defined by our ability to love.

The answer was fiction writing for Byliner (“The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir about Writing and Life”), and, for Audible, marriage (“This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage”).

Even if you’re writing a book that jumps around in time, has ten points of view, and is chest deep in flashbacks, do your best to write it in the order in which it will be read, because it will make the writing, and the later editing, incalculably easier.