Want a way to truly get to know your characters? Pick a Myers-Briggs personality for them.

Take the anxiety out of writing — especially freelance writing, which is compounded by having to create great work for others — by simply pounding out a shitty first draft.

I’ve been a long-time fan of Colson Whitehead, and recently read the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Nickel Boys, his newest novel. Read more about it, some of his other works that I love, and the unfortunate significance of reading The Nickel Boys this week.

I reread Leading Men last week for a book club, and it was one of my favorite novels of 2019. Read about what a beautiful, stylistically written book it is, full of longing and desire.

I’m a writer, so my outlook on reality is a bit skewed, in that one part of me lives life while the writer part of me stands back and processes it. I’ve also been working on another project about storytelling, and in taking a closer look at the Hero’s Journey, the classic framework for storytelling, I realized that we fit right in.

Many years ago I took a playwriting class that consisted in part of discussing great drama and reading aloud our own pieces, but mostly consisted of our professor giving us pep talks on the literary life. “No one’s going to care if you stop writing,” he declared, explaining how since family and friends didn’t understand what we did, no one would be concerned if we took a different route. “You have to do it for you.”

Another truth he upheld was, “There is no Muse.”