Category: The Writing Life

  • The Fine Art of Being Someone Else

    When I first started working as a ghostwriter, people (and by people I mean only writers) often asked me what it was like or how it was different from writing fiction for… And they often would struggle to finish that sentence. “Myself?” I asked. I generally told them I didn’t know the answer to that…

  • Singing Your Own Voice

    THE SUMMER I WAS 19, I lived in Manhattan for the first time in my life. I worked two jobs as I aspired to write my first plays. I was a bellhop at a mid- town hotel and a waiter in a restaurant around the corner.  My weekend shifts at the hotel had me working…

  • How to Write a Novel in 6 Steps

    1. Don’t write what you know. Start with what you don’t know, what you don’t understand. Pay attention to what compels you, what bothers and truly fascinates you. 2. Start to write about specific people. They live in a specific place at a specific time. You don’t think about those initial questions any more. You…

  • Packing: Writing on the Move

    It’s evening and I’m packing for an early morning flight to New York City. Tomorrow I’ll join a large reading focusing on love and hope (something I need more than ever these days), then I’ll host a reading celebrating the work of the writer Rigoberto Gonzalez. I’m used to travel. I can even say I…

  • Along Stretches Of This River

    We use words to build images. We put the words together in a particular order, and if we’re lucky, something happens other than the relaying of information. The reader takes those words and assembles and reassembles them in their mind. It’s the inseparable sensory experience we’re after (we being the writer and the reader). In…

  • LITERARY ACTIVISM AND THE WRITING LIFE

    In a world fraught with political tensions and daily life and death matters, can our stories really make a difference? I had never been to a protest until two years ago; I went with friends to the Occupy March in Oakland. For the longest time, I was afraid of going to jail or of being…

  • WHAT TO QUARRY

    I’ve heard that writing well is less a function of how many words you know and more about how you use them. I’d like to add that, for me, it also has to do with the words I find. I’ve spent many years looking for the right words, poking around in books and attics, old…

  • Loving Our Work and Letting it Go

    One morning many years ago, I phoned a writer friend and asked if she would take a look at a manuscript I’d recently completed, one that I was particularly fond of. I guess you could call it a crush. Yes, I had a crush on my manuscript. (If you’re a writer, you probably know how…

  • Stubbornness and Luck

    At age 14, I wrote my first poem—an awful sequence of rhyming couplets that I originally began in a half-baked attempt to convince a schoolmate to leave the guy she was sleeping with and resume dating my bleak, virginal self. Aside from yielding a horrible poem, and aside from drawing no response at all from…