Stories, ideas, and creative work from Ron Leigh
I spent three months learning AutoLISP — the scripting language for AutoCAD — for a side gig, and somehow it rearranged how I think about drafting, revising, and knowing when a thing is actually finished. Here's what a forty-year-old programming language taught me about the creative process.
Ron hires a Fiverr voice actor to narrate his messiest work-in-progress, then endures the horror of hearing every flabby sentence delivered in a warm, professional baritone. Turns out the cheapest revision tool on the internet is another person's voice.
For thirty days I filled my journal in other people's handwriting — my mother's loops, my brother's cramped scrawl, a friend's perfect architect print. Somewhere in all that borrowed ink, I found out how much my handwriting had been deciding what I was allowed to say.
Forget Pomodoro timers and app blockers. I started measuring my writing sessions in jukebox plays at a roadside diner, and somehow the work got done. Here's the system, the songs, and why three minutes of Buddy Holly beats any productivity hack.
I spent thirty days drafting my memoir with 'he' instead of 'I,' and something strange happened: the man on the page got braver than I've ever been. Here's what shifted, scene by scene, and why every stuck writer should try it once.
I kept a voicemail from my dad for years after he died and never once played it all the way through. When I finally transcribed it, I learned more about dialogue than any workshop ever taught me.
When my childhood house went up for sale, I couldn't stop thinking about whoever would sleep in my old bedroom next. So I wrote them a letter and hid it where they'd eventually find it — in the junk drawer, like all important things.
Everyone says the discipline of writing starts before sunrise, so for thirty days I refused to touch the keyboard until 9 PM. What I learned about the advice business—and about my own brain—was worth every yawn I didn't have.
In January, I dug out a shoebox of unanswered mail from 2014 — fan notes, contest rejections, a letter from an old professor — and replied to every single one. A decade of delay turned out to be the most honest editorial feedback I've ever received.
One form rejection out of dozens hid a single handwritten line that changed how I write forever. Here's how to spot the critique you're avoiding — and what to do with it.
I banned invented characters from my desk for twelve months and wrote only about real people, real conversations, and real diners. It fixed my craft, complicated a few friendships, and taught me what fiction was actually for.
Ten years of reader emails, DMs, and handwritten notes had piled up in a folder I was too chicken to open. So I spent a long weekend answering every single one — and learned more about my own work than I did in a decade of writing it.
I picked a single paragraph and rewrote it every morning for a month, keeping every version like a lab sample. Somewhere around day nineteen, the paragraph stopped listening to me — and started teaching me instead.
I took one embarrassing afternoon from my own life and rewrote it as noir, horror, romance, a Western, and five other genres just to see what would happen. What I learned is that genre isn't a costume — it's a scalpel.
One folding table, a beat-up typewriter, and a hand-lettered sign: 'Tell me your story, I'll write your letter.' Forty-two people sat down. Here's what they wanted the world to know, and what they couldn't quite say themselves.
For one full year, every big call on my newsletter — the name, the send time, even the sign-off — came from readers. Here's what happened when I stopped gripping the wheel.
I gave myself one day at Denver International to write an entire story using nothing but dialogue I overheard in the terminal. Here's what airport strangers taught me about plot, ethics, and how much of life is already a first draft.
I spent one week writing nothing of my own — every story had to open with a phrase I found abandoned somewhere: a grocery list, a bus stub, a scribble in a library book. Turns out strangers write better first lines than I do.
For thirty days, I let cashiers, bus drivers, and party guests name every character in my fiction. The names I never would've picked turned out to be exactly what the stories needed.
Every Tuesday, I spend four bucks at a diner booth and hash out my biggest decisions with the only person who really knows the stakes: me. Turns out a change of scenery beats any app with a notification badge.