The Caffeinated Writer

How My Brain Hit Pause random photo of my Hermes 3000, with gratitude that I can still type A strange thing happened one week ago today. My brain, on which I’ve been able to rely for most of my life, suddenly stopped functioning properly. Or it stopped communicating properly with my mouth. Or something. I don’t know the biological specifics. I just know that I can no longer speak the way I used to speak—fluidly, easily. What was, for most of my life, effortless, has suddenly become effortful.

Writer friends often ask me whether or not it’s worthwhile to set up a Substack. The short answer is: Absolutely! Over the past few years, I’ve become a little addicted to Substack. It’s the first place I go online in the morning to read, and it’s the first site I open when I want to write. I learn something every day, and I end up writing a lot more than I used to. Because I go several years between books, I worry that my readers will forget about me before the next one comes out.

Photo by Lucas van Oort on Unsplash Today, we’ll be looking at memorable beginnings from five critically acclaimed novels. We’ll analyze why the opening sentences work and think about how we can apply the principles of these beginnings to our own first chapters. Our examples come from Milan Kundera, Anthony Doerr, Lydia Netzer, Virginia Woolf, and Gustave Flaubert.

I love to write in the morning, and I love a bit of direction. Some of my most surprising stories have come from assignments given to me by anthology editors. More than a decade ago, Jeff VanderMeer edited an anthology called Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories. The assignment: write a story based on a single word. The word he assigned to me was Logorrhea. I had to look it up—”a tendency to extreme loquacity.” A few years after that, Don Noble asked me to write a story for Alabama Noir.

St. Lazare train station, photo by Michelle Hello, everyone. It has been a minute. Without going into the details, I will say that I’m not one of those writers who can write through life’s biggest challenges. For me, in the midst of upheaval, creativity stalls. During the last couple of months, however, I did manage to do one final rewrite on a novel that has been five years in the making, turn it in to my publisher, and get the all-clear.

Photo by Luan de Oliveira Silva on Unsplash You know suspense when you see it in a film. You feel suspense when you read a book that makes you anticipate the next page, the next chapter, or even the next sentence. In a novel, suspense is simply the aspect of the story that causes readers to wonder, “What happens next?” Whether you’re writing a literary coming-of-age novel or a sci-fi epic, there’s no story without suspense.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash This weekend, I thought I’d share a simple story prompt with you, inspired by the lovely flash fiction The Last Long Night, by Lina Rather, originally published in Daily Science Fiction and later republished in Flash Fiction Online. An accomplished musician who happens to be a student in my Flash Fiction Intensive noted the steady tempo of this story.

Photo by Domina Petric on Unsplash Armistead Maupin signed off on one of his recent video posts with the words, “Kindness, love, that’s really all we have.” I’ve been thinking about kindness and love a lot recently, as I go through the most trying, difficult period of my life. Since this Substack is about writing, I’m thinking about how kindness holds a place in our writing as well.

I have a confession: every single novel I write gives me a giant headache. Every time, there’s a moment in the writing when I find myself in the weeds, wondering where I’m going. So why do I keep doing it? Because I love it, and because when an idea for a novel grabs hold of me, I can’t let it go until I’ve written it. When I begin a novel, I never know…

As the year comes to a close, I just wanted to thank you for being a subscriber to The Caffeinated Writer. Here's a list of everything I published in the newsletter in 2025. The majority of the posts were on the craft of fiction, followed by posts inspiration and the writing life, and finally, publishing and the business of writing. If you enjoy reading The Caffeinated Writer, hopefully this post will serve as a useful index.