on writing

I feel a bit self-conscious that I’ve cycled through so many jobs, but it’s the nature of being an artist and working. It’s difficult to find a job you can put everything into and still have time and energy for writing.

a work of fiction can have a thesis statement, just like an essay, but it isn’t necessarily interested in answering that thesis statement. That helped me heaps. I write to try to understand things that confuse me.

But what I’ve realized—and it’s always embarrassing because a lot of people talk about things coming naturally, hearing a voice or this or that—I work very much in systems. I’m like, okay, this voice speaks in this tense and uses these words. I make banks of vocabulary. When the natural creativity dies in me, I am really surprised how I can backwar... See more

Years ago, someone introduced me to the idea of draft zero: all I’m doing is telling myself the story. I go where I want to go. I don’t worry too much about point of view or voice. It’s like chopping down the tree I’m later going to carve into something.

they entice the reader first, and then introduce their subject.

The goal of deep copying is to:

1. Understand the specific moves a writer is making , in as much detail as possible. This involves a lot of close reading and reverse outlining. I’m essentially taking apart an essay and making extremely pedantic, precise observations: 12 paragraphs; first paragraph is 6 sentences long and opens with a quote, then conte

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Stay safe, y’all. Failing that, stay fierce.