becoming a better writer

“I can feel jealous of David Sedaris’s fame, I can feel like I’ll never get to that point, but I should ask myself: am I doing 15 or 20 full rewrite drafts of my essays? Am I pushing myself to search for a universal feeling, for a moment of poignancy, and for a laugh, all in the same piece? Am I doing what he did, in my own way? No, no, and no. I a

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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

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

In fact, the more obviously conceptual a dish is, the less powerful it will be. This is something that still bothers me about our ceci e pepe dish. If I could do it again, I wouldn’t call it that—I’d name it something like chickpeas with buttered noodles. Ceci e pepe is too explicit. It’s telling diners what to think instead of letting them draw th... See more

we’ll need to return to David Ogilvy to explain it. Part of his influence comes from two books, Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963) and Ogilvy on Advertising (1983), which laid out his approach to advertising, and how clear, resonant language and crisply executed graphic design could turn a mere commodity into something desirable. But the book... See more

Do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

There are times I sit down to write this thing and all I’ve got is a spark of an idea. There’s nothing fiery in my belly waiting to get out. This is one such time. I was whining about it to my husband and he wisely said, “just write about all your half ideas.”

“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

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.