Category: writing

• The most useful, beautiful, and dangerous of humanity’s inventions

  Over in the Adjacent Possible, Rick Liebling interviewed me about writing Bandwidth: Planes are computers we fly in. Stoves are computers we cook on. Buildings are computers we inhabit. Nearly every manufactured object has a chip in it, and we deploy sensors to make everything that isn’t already a computer machine-readable. In doing so, we…

• What Writers Do

  Imagine you’re holding a laser pointer. You can point it at anything you want: a potted cactus, the Diophantine Equation scrawled across a whiteboard, the steaming cross section of a fresh baked croissant, a malfunctioning karaoke machine, a whorled knob of lichen encrusted bark, a lopsided smile, the green flash of a Pacific sunset, a…

• Refracting Reality Into Rainbows of Possibility

  I interviewed Monica Byrne about writing The Actual Star, an epic tale of self-discovery that spans millennia and questions the very meaning of civilization. Born of extensive research into Maya history and culture, this wildly ambitious speculative adventure will challenge you to reframe the past, present, and future. Monica is also the author of The…

• Please fix it!

  Emails like this are why I love my editor: The sunrise/moonset early scene near Santa Barbara. I checked and had actually noted it in my Spring comments; since it was not repaired, I assume that maybe I was ambiguous or at least not forceful enough. So let me be clear: you will lose the confidence…

• Pull a Single Thread, and the Universe Unravels

  When writing, the narrower your focus, the farther you can venture in its pursuit. In “Authority and American Usage,” David Foster Wallace’s book review of a dictionary deconstructs the complex feedback loop between language and culture. In “watermelons,” Andrea Castillo uses the eponymous fruit to cross disciplines and millennia exploring humanity’s relationship with water. In…

• How I Write Books

  I want to read a book. That particular book doesn’t exist. I write it. Thankfully, most of the time I want to read a book, it already exists, so I read it. * Complement with A Recipe for Adventure, the story behind Borderless, and Five Lessons I Learned Writing Veil. Get new posts via email:…

• Scholars of Causation

  I interviewed Stewart Brand about writing The Maintenance Race. The Maintenance Race tells the thrilling story of a 1968 solo sailing race around the world, a feat that had never before been attempted. It follows three competitors—the man who won, the man who chose not to win, and the man who cheated—illuminating what their respective…

• A Recipe for Adventure

  Welcome to my life/world which is stable until… …something disrupts it, launching me on… …a journey into the unknown where I’m beset by… …progressive complications that ultimately threaten what I care about most until… …all is lost and I must… …transform my life/world… …welcome to my new life/world. * Complement with A Brief Anatomy of…

• Heroes Are Whoever’s Left When Everyone Else Runs Away

  I interviewed Andy Weir about writing Project Hail Mary. Project Hail Mary follows an unlikely astronaut on a desperate mission to save the solar system from a spacefaring bacteria that eats sunlight. It’s an immensely entertaining adventure that will teach you more real science than you learned in high school. Never has a novel so…

• A Swing, a Miss, and a Burrito

  To whomever needs to hear this: I just took a big swing, gave it my all, and missed. I’m not gonna lie, it sucks. The details don’t matter, but this does: If I had known it would work at the outset, it wouldn’t have been worth doing. Making art requires taking real risks. Courage isn’t…