There’s a point at which everything comes together. Always. Persevering to that point is the central challenge of being a writer. Throughout the week, I assemble scraps of ideas for this newsletter. By Thursday or Friday, thematic connections have formed, seemingly of their own accord. When it’s time

About twenty years ago, I decided to make an independent film. I’d made a number of videos by that point and I felt ready to take my efforts to the next level. (I wasn’t, but that’s a different story.) At the time, I was working in a

Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’

Just a quick one this morning to help propel you through the final days of NaNoWriMo [https://nanowrimo.org/]. Or at least shake off the funk of Black Friday buyer’s remorse. If you’re a regular reader, you might wonder why I look for ideas everywhere but the world

In The Craft of Writing [https://bookshop.org/books/the-craft-of-writing/9780393300505], the editor William Sloane writes that the ability to tell a good story, the “narrative faculty,” can’t be taught: > Its techniques can be discussed—foreshadowing, for instance, or the structure of scenes in fiction and nonfiction, perhaps

In a 1982 interview [http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/musn82.htm], Brian Eno said: > My reputation is far bigger than my sales. I was talking to Lou Reed the other day and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the

A couple of years have passed since Stanley Kubrick’s death. His assistant Tony Frewin invites journalist and documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson to the late director’s house. There, Ronson is to be given the rare opportunity of studying Kubrick’s archives. No, not the archived films themselves, but all

By the time I got around to writing my final college admission essay, I already felt beaten. It had been brutally hard work presenting myself in the best possible light. In each previous essay, I’d prevaricated with a vengeance, glossing over my many defects as a college candidate: mediocre

The expression “to have your work cut out for you” originally meant “preparing what you need to accomplish a task smoothly and efficiently,” just as a tailor’s assistant cut out the necessary pieces of cloth for the boss to get right to work. By the time the idiom appeared

Maybe it’s the turn of the season—and what a winter this one promises to be—but I’ve been thinking about the meaning and importance of my work. What-am-I-doing-here questions. Lately, I’ve been dipping into A Mathematician’s Apology by G.H. Hardy. Hardy turned to writing