writing & storytelling

Taste requires originality. It invokes an aspirational authenticity. Writer George Saunders calls this “achieving the iconic space,” and it’s what he’s after when he meets his creative writing students. “They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space” — the place from ... See more

“In order for the drama to deepen we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

The one practice I kept was writing. It made the cut because I can’t deny how many good things in my life have come as a result of my putting words out into the world. It also felt like a respite: one area where I wasn’t skeptical of my identity. I’m at my most courageous on the page because interrogating my feelings with words feels justified and

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I’m at my most courageous on the page because interrogating my feelings with words feels justified and purposeful in the case that it helps someone else understand the mess of the human condition.

AJ Tibando

1d

When I started writing, my sister gave me this advice:

“Don’t tell people what to think, why it matters or what they should do about it - just tell them your story. Talk about what you learned but don’t tell them what they should learn. They’ll either learn it by listening or aren’t interested in learning. And if they’re not interested, ... See more

I’m always searching for mystery, something unexpected and dissonant, something to be curious about.

by gems I do NOT mean the author’s ideas or theories. Those are the last things we want. We want to form our own ideas. By gems I mean a little glimpse of something surprising and dissonant and mysterious – a person or a situation or a moment in history where you think, ‘I didn’t expect that ’ or ‘I don’t understand that , I’d like to go down a rab... See more

a good story, by definition, has to be smarter than the person who wrote it. Because if it’s less smart, that means the writer wasn’t writing a story but assembling a piece of Ikea furniture. Most of the masterpieces I’ve encountered were smarter than their creators, and often more decent and purely good than them, too.

FEH, my newest memoir (more details about that soon), began with my wanting to write about the rampant judgementalism and sneering contempt I was seeing all around me. It takes on God, Jesus, Paul Rudd, Nextdoor, social media, Schopenhauer, Wolf Blitzer and Yuval Noah Harari. And even with all those sacred cows, it felt bland... until I decided to ... See more