Category: writing

• Bridging the personal and the universal

  A key component in great writing is building bridges between the personal and the universal. Without specific incarnation, universals revert to truisms. The insight you’re trying to articulate may be foundational, but cliché drains it of color and weight. Aphorisms can blaze bright on social media because aspiration is a potent fuel for sharing, but…

• Reassurance

  When I ask for advice, often what I’m really looking for is reassurance. But the work I’m most proud of requires taking real risks with no possible guarantee of success, so seeking reassurance that things will turn out okay is a trap. Trust yourself. Trust the process. * Complement with Most successful people have no…

• Narrative daisy-chains

  We all know that stories sometimes go viral, apotheosizing into memes. But much more interesting than a single story propagating itself through retelling is when stories inspire the telling of other stories in a cascading cultural daisy-chain. What anecdote can you share with a friend that inspires them to share an anecdote of their own,…

• A pop band that talks about complicated emotions

  “At the heart of Sylvan Esso is this really fun argument —Nick wants things to sound unsettling, but I want you to take your shirt off and dance,” says Amelia Meath of the band she cofounded in 2012 that now boasts two million monthly listeners on Spotify. “We’re trying to make pop songs that aren’t on…

• Quantity is a route to quality, not its opposite

  There’s a school of advice that claims good writing is the result of endless, painstaking, comprehensive rewrites that iterate toward perfection, but I’ve learned much more about craft writing and publishing nine novels than I ever would have rewriting my first novel nine times. Quality versus quantity is a false dichotomy. Quantity is a route…

• Granular verisimilitude

  You know you have a good editor—thanks Tim!—when they point out that the narratively-necessary-but-totally-arbitrary-8-digit number in your novel manuscript is unlikely to have the unique digits you thought would make it appear random because among the 100 million 8-digit numbers, there are only about 1.8 million whose digits are all different. So your number is…

• The Science of Fiction on Veil

  Maddie Stone published a generous, thoughtful, and mind-expanding essay exploring the implications of the near future extrapolated in my latest novel: Geoengineering, or hacking the planet to cool it down, is either a maniacal plan dreamt up by foolhardy scientists or a useful tool for staving off climate catastrophe—maybe both. It raises hard questions about…

• Italo Calvino on what makes great writing great

  From Six Memos for the New Millennium: From its beginnings, my work as a writer has aimed to follow the lightning-fast course of mental circuits that capture and link points that are far apart in space and time. In my fondness for adventure stories and fairy tales, I have always sought something like an inner…

• Lasting value

  There are so many books to write, so many things to build, so many meals to cook, so many messages to send, so many songs to sing, so many experiments to run, so many conversations to have, so many dreams to realize. Everything burgeons with possibility, and the more abundant your curiosity, the more active…

• Kim Stanley Robinson on inventing plausible utopias

  Global pandemic. Raging wildfires. Political upheaval. Never-ending Zooms. Twenty-twenty is the dystopia Hollywood has always dreamed of, sans a satisfying narrative arc. In times like these, nihilism beckons. Just give up, history seems to be saying. There’s nothing you can do. The best you can hope to for is to protect your own as you…