Creative Work (is Real Work)
Newsletter (Digital)
Let me say that again.
Creative. Work. Is. Real. Work.
This newsletter will offer a mix of opinion, encouragement, commiseration, community, and tools to make the fragmented archipelago of the creative process a little more navigable. I’ll do this both through practical how-to tips and gentle reframing of the paradigms around creative work and other roles. (And sometimes not so gentle. Some of those paradigms need to be exploded.) This newsletter will be most useful for writers of fiction—which is what I am—but will likely have some utility to writers of all the other things, as well as creatives in other media.
This publication has never and will never use generative AI. Source
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| Scope | International |
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| Language | English |
| Country | N/A |
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| Frequency | Other |
Recent Articles
Search ArticlesIgnore Your Kids and Write
My sister and my mother in 1965. I will never forget the look on my sixteen-year-old daughter’s face. Advance reader copies of my second book had come in the mail, and I handed Mia one. “Look at the dedication page.” She opened to the title page, and was like, “What?” “No. The dedication page.” Which reads, To Morgan and Mia. She found it and broke out into the biggest, sweetest, most genuine smile. A smile of full-on, childlike delight.
LET’S TALK FOR A MINUTE ABOUT BAD WORDS
We are writers. We use words. Swear words are words. Adverbs are words. Words in languages other than the language we write in are words. Words like amanuensis and mimetic are words. Made-up words are words. There are no such thing as “amateur” words and “pro” words; legitimate words and illegitimate words; good words and bad words. They are just. Fucking. Words. I happen to be fond of swear words.
THE "PIVOT"
There must be some astrological condition going on that I don’t know about, because there is some serious thematic shit happening in my life this winter, and it all keeps coming back to the word pivot.
Am I a Writer Now?
This is taped to wall over my desk. Here’s the weird thing. I completed my first publishing contract, and my publisher declined to sign me again. Then I spent almost two years trying to write a book that didn’t cross the finish line. Now I have a completed manuscript of a whole ‘nother idea, and I have no idea if it’s any good, or will get picked up by an editor, or published or anything. It’s weird and different and outside of my wheelhouse. So who fucking knows?
Manifesto as Self Care
The Queen of Swords, truth-teller, from the Shadowscapes tarot by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law About six years ago, before I was agented or published, right after chemotherapy and much more acquainted with my mortality than I had been before, I found it necessary to write a manifesto. For as long as I could remember, I had an inner voice whispering to me, you’re not good enough. You’re going to fail. It will be embarrassing. It was insidious and grown-in like an invasive vine.
Story Structure for Intuitive Drafters
View from the Amtrak Northeast Regional, taken by my then five-year-old daughter Are you allergic to the idea of planning when writing a first draft? Does it feel like it will ruin the mystery, the magic, the flow? I get that. If I know too much ahead of time, it can kill the whole thing. I have more than once meticulously mapped out a story that I will probably never write because I overdid it on the planning and now the actual writing doesn’t seem fun.
WHAT PUBLISHING REALLY WANTS
My late father’s typewriter, bought new in 1952. Still works almost flawlessly. Hello friends. I want to address what I consider to be some incorrectness circulating online about what it takes to geta novel traditionally published. I am not talking memoir or nonfiction here. Just novel-length fiction. And not self- or hybrid- or even small press publishing. Trad pub only.Okay?
You Don't Have to Know Why
My family on the dock in Emäsalo, Finland. As a voracious consumer of anything about the craft of writing, and a bit of a contrarian by nature, anything that begins to smell of received wisdom gets me sniffing around to pick apart its weaknesses.
For a minute there, I thought I knew what I was doing
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash For a minute, I thought I knew what I was doing. Then I thought, who the fuck am I? What on earth makes me think I know what I’m doing? It’s unfortunate, but I’ve been through this cycle many, many times in my life. A little bit of fluency followed by a gut punch of self-doubt. Sometimes the self-doubt comes out of nowhere; sometimes it comes from my response to something in the real world.
On Pride, Capitalism, and Creativity
Photo by Simon Maage on Unsplash It’s so hard writing a book—a newborn baby of a first draft of a book—knowing it is going to have to go out there and compete in the most un-meritocratic of marketplaces. It’s going to have to compete against books that ping every dopamine sensor they can possibly find. That have foiled covers, and sprayed edges, and tables in bookstores all to themselves, and gigantic fucking marketing budgets, regardless of whether they are actually any good or not.