becoming a better writer

“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.

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.

In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind . It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole... See more

When All Else Fails, Go to the Movies

“It’s what I call the Don Draper Principle,” says Abbott, “because he always did that on Mad Men . I tend to see something, usually horror, something that completely demands my attention and is very big and spectacle-oriented, because it can knock me out of what I’m thinking about in a good way. Or sometimes it... See more

A large percentage of people’s problems in work, love and life are due to some combination of vagueness and passivity. You don’t know what you want to spend your time on; you don’t know what kind of person you really get along with; you don’t know what kind of clothing looks good to you; you don’t know what you value in a city; you don’t know how t... 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.

Almost everything about the concept of “writer’s block” irritates me. The supposed greatest obstacle to success or productivity is structured so passively you’d think it was written by the New York Times trying to describe civilian death. “Writer’s block.” What exactly is being blocked and by whom? The process of writing — not writing well, just wr... 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.”

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.”