Normally, I curate my morning reading stack based on "readability." In the morning, I'm fresh, for all of an hour or two anyway. Why not make the most of it? Toughest reads first. It's all downhill from there. By the afternoon, my capacity for mental labor is significantly curtailed. Mostly,

Writers worry about the wrong things. Take a lesson from film producers. The cardinal rule of making movies is to get every red cent up on that screen. Don't waste a penny on anything viewers won't notice. It's a relief to realize that movies aren't real. The illusion ends at

In his newsletter, Mason Currey, author of Daily Rituals, shares writing advice from the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek: It’s psychologically impossible for me to sit down [and write], so I have to trick myself.Like jumping out of an airplane—presumably—commencing a writing session can trigger a panic

Slumped on the couch after a long day at the keyboard, I often turn to episodes of Seinfeld to unwind—comfort food from Tom's Diner. Recently, I re-watched "The Marine Biologist," which features one of the show's most inspired intersections between storylines. In search of amusement, Kramer goes to the

A published book, good or bad, is the culmination of a staggering array of decisions, from scope to subtitle to, well, every single word of the manuscript. The sheer potential of any yet-to-be-written book, short or long, stuns and boggles the mind. Writer's block—ha! The problem isn't too few

The manuscript of a book is a hearty, unmanageable thing. Even a slim book clocks in at 40,000 words or more, and I’ve never written one shorter than 90,000 myself. Forget wrapping your head around 90,000 words. You might as well grasp the entirety of your

David Lynch came to a creative crossroads during the five-year production of his first film, Eraserhead. The project was coming together scene by scene, but the underlying meaning remained elusive to its maker. What, exactly, was he trying to say with this odd character and the oblique but compelling sequence

There’s a small photo studio in town, right off the main drag. This morning, I noticed that they’ve lined their front window with examples of the work they’ve done for other inhabitants of this fine little burg. Among these sample images were photos of a local teen

Something extraordinary takes place in an episode of Hoarders, the long-running reality series about people with hoarding disorder. After getting the preliminaries out of the way, the therapist calls the hoarder’s attention to the gorilla in the room. Except, in this case, the gorilla is a pumpkin. “What pumpkin?