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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.
Last Tuesday I brought one piece of writing from each decade of my life to the coffee shop on Fifth Street and read them in order, iced tea sweating on the table. Some of it burned. Some of it surprised me. All of it taught me more than any workshop ever did.
Most writers hide their rejection letters. I've kept mine for twenty years, and I think they're the most honest part of my archive. A walk through five of them — and what happened after each one landed.
For years I wrote like someone I'd invented — all polish and no pulse. Then a single paragraph in my own voice changed everything I thought a 'real writer' was supposed to sound like.
I used to think my abandoned projects were failures. Turns out they're an inventory — and the most reliable idea generator I own.
I've spent fifteen years filling notebooks with ideas so bad they should be illegal. Turns out that graveyard of failures is the most valuable thing on my desk. Here's why you need one too.