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How do we as writers best learn successful habits? By emulating the successful? As I prepared for my first return to AWP in six years, I had to brace myself for the inevitable recognition of Survivorship Bias in my own thinking and the confounding nature of writing advice in general. Never mind the fact that […]

You imagined the chair of the creative writing program spoke the same words as the head of the drama department. “She is terrible, but there is something about her.” You imagined the chair twisted his mustache hair while he looked at some other core faculty on the opposite side of his desk. Then you saw

Comedian Steve Harvey has a routine where he talks about the third eye of comedians. In talking about this third eye, he says that you get your two natural eyes, but you also get a third eye that allows you to “see” the underlying currents in situations — or, to see things that others don’t

My friend Chris invited me to visit her at work. She’s a nurse practitioner at a VA clinic in San Francisco, and she and her colleague Erin had begun a writing group for homeless vets. I’d helped them set up the guidelines for the group, using what I’d picked up from my time as a

The first time I held an infant in my arms I was eleven years old. My mother had offered me over to watch the son of a client while they toured the woman’s home and my mother advised her on preparing the property for sale. She’s wonderful with babies, she told the woman when we

“Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde. One of the hardest parts about being a writer is dealing with the tangled mess of emotions that assaults you when you’re reading something you love: there’s a feeling of sheer joy in the lyricism of words well woven; a renewed awareness of the pure

The principle is simple: potential energy turns to kinetic energy. Momentum is a force of movement, of energy, but most importantly, of consistency. Don’t panic. I’m not going to throw physics equations at you. Couldn’t even if I wanted to. I don’t have the greatest scientific mind, but I do know a little about writing.

“It is […] true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to receive, to nourish yourself, and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.” Excerpted from a letter that Anais Nin

I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard with my half-sister, Judy. She’s 81, decades older than me, my father having married the first time just out of his teens, and the last time, to my mother, when he was pushing fifty. Judy led me to the window of a lighting store, and pointed to a dusty