becoming a better writer

Have killer voice. How do you develop killer voice? Be confident. How do you develop confidence? Read oodles and write oodles more. If you’re sending a “list newsletter” you better have one hell of a point of view because, well, there are oodles-upon-oodles of list newsletters out there. Generally, like with much good writing, the magic for readers

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fiction is made out of experience, your whole life from infancy on, everything you’ve thought and done and seen and read and dreamed. But experience isn’t something you go and get—it’s a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to... See more

Gornick, again: “Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand.”

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

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

“Write from the scar, not the wound” the old saying goes. Share only from scar tissue once it’s all healed over and you’re strong enough to withstand any poking. A memoir is not a diary; it is not a big messy cake, it’s more like something that’s been moulded using those metal cookie cutter shapes. Selected, crafted, arranged for consumption.

“When I was a young writer,” Neil Gaiman reflected in View from the cheap seats , “ I liked to imagine that I was paying someone for every word I wrote, rather than being paid for it; it was a fine way to discipline myself only to use those words I needed.”

“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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