Why you should ALWAYS read your story aloud before publishing here. Or anywhere. In college I got in the habit of reading every paper I wrote aloud. I caught grammatical mistakes, way more than an English major should cop to. When I began at the student newspaper, I muttered each…

The story archetype that will guide every story you write here, and anywhere else. I pitched a story to a magazine editor yesterday that got a hard no. It surprised me, the swiftness of his response. I thought the general-interest magazine might go for the rag-to-riches story of an immigrant…

How your stories here can make money off the passage of time. Last week I wrote a piece I wrote for The Atlantic. I struggled for quite a while trying to figure out the structure to impose on the piece. …

How to approach the stories you write, and even the life you life. I’m reporting a magazine profile on an Iowa farmer at the moment, a piece that has a psychological angle as well. What happens to our mindset when we look at our bounty and then our neighbors’. I’m…

Three examples of courage, craft, and dignity, from three highly successful people. Everything I’ve consumed of late spoke to why creative types succeed. You may remember a couple months back when everything I liked spoke to how creative types deal with failure. …

It’s a mindset shift for all writers that’s easier to pull off than you think. I’m a big fan of Cal Newport’s work, his books and pieces in The New Yorker. He went on Tim Ferriss’ podcast recently and talked about how to actually see through your most ambitious projects. …

Learn this now. Succeed as a writer later. My sister texted me yesterday with a link to a story called “The Thousand Pages” from the novelist J.T. Bushnell. He wasn’t always a novelist. He used to be a short story writer. In the essay he writes about his transition from…

How decisions reveal character in any story you tell. I just read Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel. It’s stunning. Mandel’s characters advance the plot through their actions. In other words, Mandel forces her characters to make choice after choice in the novel, and those choices have repercussions and…

It’s all about playing the infinite game. While researching my first book I read Max Boot’s Invisible Armies. It’s an epic history of guerrilla warfare: who staged these campaigns and why they succeeded or failed. They almost always succeeded because whether it was outmanned Jews in Rome-controlled Israel, New England…