This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

No matter what you’re writing—story, novel, poem, essay—the first thing you’re going to need is an idea. As I said earlier, don’t make this the intimidating part. Ideas are everywhere. Lift up a big rock and look under it, stare into a window of a house you drive past and dream about what’s going on inside. Read the newspaper, ask your father about

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”).

If you want to write and can’t figure out how to do it, try picking an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, say, and work up as quickly as possible to as much time as you can spare. Do you really want to write? Sit for two hours a day. During that time, you don’t have to write, but you must stay at your desk with

In time, a lot of time, after I left Friday’s and Nashville on a fellowship that allowed me to write my first novel, I came to see that there was something liberating about failure and humiliation. Life as I had known it had been destroyed so completely, so publicly, that in a way I was free, as I imagine anyone who walks away from a crash is free.

“That’s not the question,” I said. “It’s so much more complicated than that.” “It’s not more complicated than that,” she said. “That’s all there is: Does he make you better and do you make him better?”

Grace Paley was pushing us to be better people when we were still young and capable of change.

(If you want to study the master of the well-constructed chapter—and plot and flat-out gorgeous writing—read Raymond Chandler. The Long Goodbye is my favorite.)

I was greatly affected by Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift,

Writer’s block is a topic of great discussion, especially among young writers and people who think I should write their book for them. I understand being stuck. It can take a very long time to figure something out, and sometimes, no matter how much time you put in, the problem cannot be solved. To put it another way, if it were a complicated math p

the literature class, the teaching assistants were told to cover two novels (any two novels, any of them), two plays (one Shakespeare and one contemporary), some short stories, and a section on poetry. We were given two days of group instruction, a class schedule, a room number, and that was it. We were on our own. It was terrifying, and I learned