Video-forward platforms including Instagram, TikTok and YouTube shorts—but also Facebook, X, Threads and even LinkedIn—reward users for bravely showing up on camera to share their thoughts and passions, and they all host rich, engaged and voracious communities of readers ready to discover you and your writing. In this live webinar, discover what it takes to get started with (or improve!) your social video game, including what to post and where to reach new fans, build your platform and become an influential author.

This live webinar will be interactive, with time for questions and answers.

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If you want more online education, see the full list of WDU courses here.

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There’s Still Time to Join Us in London!

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I met the nonagenarian author at a secret location when I was in Egypt researching a novel. Some years before, a fanatic had stabbed him in the neck for alleged blasphemy in a book that the assailant hadn’t bothered to read. Instead of spending the remainder of his life cowering in isolation, Mahfouz arranged to meet with friends at shifting locations around Cairo every week. His biographer Raymond Stock brought me to one of those meetings, in a back room of the Shepherd’s Hotel bar, and that was how I found myself talking to this frail, old man in dark glasses.

We spoke about a lot of things that night, with a guard keeping an eye on the door and a TV screen on the wall showing a woman in gold paint dancing languidly. A few months later, Mahfouz died. As I read his obituary back in America, one thing he’d said stayed with me.

“When I look back,” he said in a raspy, sardonic voice. “I realize that I’ve learned more from the near-great than I have from the great.”

That struck me as a very sensible piece of advice.

Of course, you can study Shakespeare until your eyes burn red or listen to Beethoven until you go deaf. But as a matter of practical craftsmanship, true geniuses don’t leave many footprints for mere mortals to follow. I’m not saying Herman Wouk is better than Tolstoy (Tolstoy rocks). But there are times when you can learn more about simple plot construction from Winds of War than War and Peace.

Putting it another way: Always read writers who are better than you, whether or not they’re superstars. Especially the ones who can show you how to reach another level.

I’ve been fortunate enough in my career to work with some wonderful writers. And some who merely thought they were wonderful. The genuine talents always had something valuable to say about writing. Here are some of the best tips I’ve heard.

The importance of details

Pete Hamill was a legendary New York newspaper columnist—back when writing for newspapers could make you a legend. If you haven’t read his memoir, A Drinking Life, you should do so right away. Pete was also one of my first bosses, hiring as a summer assistant when I was barely getting through college. The first day, he took me out to lunch at a place called Reuben’s and over a ham-and-egg sandwich told me something I’ve never forgotten.

He said, “If you have an experience—and you think there’s any chance you will ever write about that experience—stop whatever you’re doing and write down every detail you can think of within 24 hours. Because the detail that seems insignificant will later turn out to be the whole story.”

Four decades later, it’s still the best advice I ever got. That chintzy picture frame in the living room? Put it in your notes. It might turn out to be a family heirloom smuggled out of Nuremberg. That pork-pie hat that makes a probation officer look like a bookie? Bank it. The refrigerator that’s barren, except for a Dannon yogurt container and half bottle of pricey Chardonnay? Write it down somewhere. You’d be surprised how quickly you’ll forget it, and equally surprised how vivid it can be when you’re trying to describe the details of a neglected childhood.

Pete had a lot of other tips, which I’ve found helpful and you may, too. Draw pictures of your characters, so you know what they look like. Write down all their names on a list, so you don’t begin with the same first letter too often. And when you’re doing research, don’t be afraid to ask the uncomfortable question. In fact, if it makes you uncomfortable, you should ask the question. It might be the abrupt end of the conversation. Or it could be the beginning of a much more honest one.

How to create a scene

Soon after I worked with Pete, I was fortunate enough to work with another giant of New York journalism, Nicholas Pileggi. Nick is best-known as the co-screenwriter of the Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas. The film is based on Nick’s equally great nonfiction book Wiseguy, about the misadventures of mob associate-turned-informant Henry Hill. 

Long before Hollywood called, Nick was firmly established as one of the most knowledgeable chroniclers of organized crime on the East Coast, but he was always generous and kind in dealing with newer writers. One day as I passed him at the New York magazine offices, I mentioned to him that I was thinking of trying my hand at a novel or a screenplay. He looked over his shoulder as he headed for the elevator and said “Get in as late as possible, get out as soon as you can.”

As usual, Nick was right. But it’s advice I’ve seen regularly abused by film and TV writers, who believe it means they can skip the pick-and-shovel work of understanding their characters and the details of their worlds.

I’ve taken it to mean the opposite. Get to know your people and their world well enough that it all becomes second-nature, and then distill them and leave out the boring parts.

Shock vs suspense

Obviously, I never worked with Alfred Hitchcock, but he used to be such a ubiquitous presence in movies and on TV that you felt you knew him. His introductions to his anthology TV series were always funny, but as a talk show guest he could be extremely incisive—especially on the subject of storytelling.

One thing he talked about is the difference between suspense and surprise. “Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us,” he said. “Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!’

“In the first case, we have given the public 15 seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second, we have provided them with 15 minutes of suspense.” Here’s a video clip of him discussing this very idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0peWTSRtU4

This advice has stayed with me through many years and nine novels, as well as countless journalism pieces and screenplays. Nothing dates faster than “shock value,” and anticipation is always the storyteller’s friend—no matter the genre. Will the marriage last? Will Napoleon get to Russia? Will your heroine reach adulthood with an intact psyche?

And in that spirit of paying it forward, I offer four tips of my own that you might be able to adapt in your own work.

Try longhand

Just about everything in the 21st century is pushing you toward screens, keyboards, and limited attention spans. We email, we text, we TikTok, and we post the pictures to prove we exist. Close the laptop and pick up pen. It will change your mind. 

You’ll think differently: more slowly and more deeply. You won’t be able to check the news, add to your feed, or dive down a rabbit hole on the Web. You’ll be stuck with your thoughts—exactly where you need to be to write well. When you cut off access to other people’s pictures and sounds on the screen, you’ll have no choice but to create pictures and sounds in your head.

That will either make you into a writer or a certifiable crazy person—or possibly both.

Read everything you write out loud

Jean Paul Sartre said hell is other people. But he was wrong! Hell is hearing your own mistakes: your typos, elisions, repetitions, and phony transitions. But you gotta do it. Your voice will find the errors that your eye deftly evades. When you hear your own words, it’s a preview of what everyone else will experience. So don’t kid yourself. Face the music.

An addendum: If you have trouble reading one of your own sentences aloud, the problem may not be just a single misplaced word. It may be that the whole underlying idea is half-baked and needs to go back in the oven.

Check out Peter Blauner’s The Intruder here:

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Never get married to anything—but be faithful

This is the book you were born to write. You’ve found your perfect story. You’ve fallen head over heels in love with your characters and the scenes that are going to thrill your readers and break their hearts. You dedicate yourself to the project for a year, maybe more. Maybe a lot more. Then you read it over and realize…it has as much life as herring spread on a stale cracker.

What were you thinking? What made you believe you could pull this off?

Now take this with a grain of salt because it’s coming from a guy who spent two decades working on a novel that got rejected by every publisher who saw it before he rewrote it from a completely different point of view during the pandemic and finally got it published last year.

So if you can’t let the book go, step back and stop banging your head against the brick wall. There may, in fact, be treasure on the other side, but ramming it over and over isn’t getting you to it.

In a calm state of mind, ask yourself if you have found the right way to tell your story. In my case, it took many years to realize that I hadn’t. My narrative, which eventually became a novel called Picture in the Sand, was about Cecil B. DeMille coming to Egypt to film The Ten Commandments in the midst of a political upheaval that prefigured the events of 9/11. In earlier versions, the main character point of view was that of a naïve American who happens to be around during the revolution. It didn’t work.

I had a secondary character named Ali Hassan, a freelance movie critic for the Muslim Brotherhood’s newspaper who falls in love with Hollywood films and becomes Cecil B. DeMille’s assistant. He was much closer to the heart of the historic events I wanted to write about, without being an historic figure himself. But I knew there would be multiple risks in making him the main point of view in the book. And it would be even more work to rewrite the whole narrative from his point of view—especially when I decided to add an epistolary element, in which Ali, as a much older man, relates the story through emails to a grandson who has just run off to join a militant terrorist group.

I was lucky that Picture in the Sand eventually found a home. But on the other hand, it’s easy to drive yourself to madness writing endless variations on the same material. Which leads to the last tip I can offer…

Get yourself some friends

Yes, I know you probably already have friends. Maybe even a spouse or a child. But they may not be your ideal readers, especially for an early draft. An overly harsh or myopic opinion can sink your whole ship at an early, fragile stage. It helps to build a circle of trusted readers who can not only spot the flaws in your structure, but also point you toward areas that you hadn’t even considered.

If you meet someone who can do this for you, hold onto them. Buy them a drink, buy them lunch, ask about the family. And, for the love of God, don’t make up some lame excuse if they ask you to read their stuff as well.

At the end of Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White says something about the spider that I’ve never forgotten: “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”

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What is writing if not a movement of thought, an investigation of negative space, a line of words on the page? Is it that simple? How does one sit down and do it?

The following list details six books on writing. Each is written by a writer known primarily for either their poetry or fiction, which bleeds into the essay form in all sorts of interesting ways. These books not only investigate writing, they are writing.

Italo Calvino’s Six Memos For the Next Millennium

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Based on a series of lectures Calvino was set to deliver at Harvard University before his death in 1985, this posthumously-published collection of essays details six of Italo Calvino’s greatest aesthetic virtues, or “memos,” which include “Lightness,” “Quickness,” “Exactitude,” “Visibility,” “Multiplicity,” and finally, unfinished before his death, “Consistency.”

“Lightness” begins the book extolling the virtues of indirect inquiry, not facing a subject head-on. For Calvino, the ability to grapple with terror, horror, the heaviest of human afflictions, required a soft touch. To move beside it, above it, around it, “to cut off Medusa’s head without being turned to stone,” to fix one’s “gaze upon what can be revealed only by indirect vision, an image caught in a mirror.”

In a sense, Calvino’s discourse finds its way into each of the books on this list. Each attempts to talk about writing without talking about writing. Or more so, they hope to edify the reader without providing a how-to.

Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life

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Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life is a book on writing beloved by writers. In this treatise on the craft, Dillard walks it as she talks it. The movement of her sentences, both in content and composition, reveal the movement of her mind in creation, walking us through her impulses as they happen in real-time. It is a tremendously generous book, as Dillard attempts to hold nothing back, not to obfuscate or dramatize the creative process, but instead to lay it out as simply and plainly as she can, while digressing through humorous and amusing riffs. “Process is nothing,” she writes. “Erase your tracks.”

Fanny Howe’s The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation

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Part memoir, part metatext, Howe’s The Winter Sun explores the author’s relationship to the vocation of writing. Weaving reflections on her childhood in post-war Boston alongside literary and philosophical influences—including the writer Jacques Lusseryan—Howe considers the way in which deep interiority, and the writer’s ability to access it, provides a fount of ____ creativity. As much as this is a book about writing, it is also a book about history, activism, devotion to one’s craft and spiritual pursuits. Fragmentary, hybrid, this collection of notes—they are notes ultimately—traces the life of a writer in pursuit of a vocation which, for her, “has no name.”

Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead

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Canadian poet and novelist, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood dips into the metatextual form with Negotiating with the Dead. In it, she considers the role that death and mystery play in her creative process—as that force which compels her to write, and leads a reader along. She draws upon her experience as a writer to explore the role of writer in society, the origins of storytelling, and the significance of myth and archetype on the personal level. She posits that “not just some, but all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality—by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.”

Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

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What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a memoir by Haruki Murakami, the renowned Japanese novelist famous dozens of novels including The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, and 19Q4.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a rare glimpse into Haruki Murakami’s nonfiction. Reading very much like a personal journal or running log, the book is a companion of sorts as we follow Haruki in his preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon. Through its mundane and repetitive structure, one is lulled into a somewhat meditative state alongside Murakami, as he details his process in specific and unadorned language.

The effect is a way into understanding his mind, his process, what allows him to run a marathon, write a novel, string one sentence after the next. Like Calvino and like Dillard, he does it at indirect angles. Though the entire book can be read as one long metaphor for living, for writing, nothing about it reads as anything other than literal, simple, one foot in front of the other, day in and day out, in the lead-up to a race. In a way, the book’s genius is in its simplicity, its ability to expose writing as nothing more than a line of words on a page, one after the other.

Annie Dillard’s Living By Fiction

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Dillard’s lesser-known book on writing, Living by Fiction, attempts to think through storytelling by constantly eluding its subject. Dillard reflects not just on the craft of fiction, but on its role in society and on the reader.

As a writer’s writer, Dillard considers fiction less in terms of conventional structures and plots, and more in terms of style and sentence-to-sentence execution. This is no surprise, as Living By Fiction often feels like a sentence-to-sentence experiment, a how-to that runs off the tracks it builds, in the most delightful and edifying way. In a sense, this is part of its meaning, to make rules, then break them.

She considers the works of Beckett, Borges, Calvino, Cortazar, Nabokov, and other masters of the craft. She uses their texts to consider fiction’s aesthetic virtues, and to explore her own tastes and theories about writing. As always, her sentences are crystal clear, simple yet ringing with the truth.

Order a copy of Oh God, The Sun Goes by David Connor today. 

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That’s because I had to face the reality that I couldn’t succeed using what I thought was the standard career path for a concert pianist. Instead, I’d have to blaze my own trail.

That trail has led to some unexpected places, including my debut as an author with a new illustrated storybook for adults, Honey, If It Wasn’t for You. Such a project may seem odd for a concert pianist to produce, but to me it made complete sense. Once you’ve learned the rest of my story, perhaps you’ll agree.

A Very Good Place to Start

I wanted to be a performer from the beginning. My earliest memories include sitting transfixed while a Glenn Miller Orchestra record played, being amazed by the cast of STOMP turning street signs into musical instruments, and studiously watching my professional musician father play piano. By age six, I was already presenting my own house concerts complete with tickets, stage lights, and box seats for special guests.

No single style of music held my attention. I played classical on piano, but also enjoyed jazz, funk, and pop. And I didn’t play just piano, I taught myself drums. I sang a little. I rapped more. I loved the beauty that great music of any category could convey.

I didn’t know how I’d earn a living as a musician but figured that studying music in college was a good place to start. I chose piano over drums, since it’s more professionally viable, and got serious about my studies at age 16. Most elite pianists get serious about 10 years sooner than that. This was about to become painfully relevant.

I Can’t Get No Satisfaction

After graduating from The University of Oklahoma with a bachelor’s degree in piano performance, I became determined to attend a prestigious graduate school for music. Surely (so my 23-year-old brain reasoned), such a degree would ensure wild professional success.

I wasn’t as proficient as some of my competition but hoped that some professor would be willing to take a chance on me. The first indication that this plan might fail came during a conversation with one of my hopeful professors. While looking at the list of classical compositions I had ever played, he said, “I have 13-year-old students with more repertoire than you.” I got rejected by every elite school I applied to.

My career plan was shattered. I had hoped to become a professional concert pianist, but if I couldn’t get a live audition at an elite school, that seemed unlikely. What was I to do next? There was only one obvious choice: make satirical hip-hop.

Shake Till You Feel Better

Okay, the truth is that I didn’t really know what to do. All I knew was that I didn’t want to practice piano, but still had the creative urge to do something. So I took the most fun—and least ambitious—path. I made fun of popular rap music.

I had long enjoyed the radio hits of Jay-Z, Ludacris, and others, but the older I got, the sillier many of their songs seemed. So I made spoofs of common hip-hop themes. Instead of rapping about how great my music was, I made a song called “Not That Bad.” Instead of writing songs about alcohol like “Gin and Juice” or “Pass the Courvoisier,” I made one called “Ice Water.”

As you might guess, few people go searching for this kind of music. Still, if anyone were to enjoy it, they had to know that it existed. So I followed the advice of a close friend and marketing expert. “If you want people to be interested in your product, explain the process that went into making it.

The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow

I started making videos, blog posts, and posts on social media, and what do you know? A type of music that almost no one goes searching for started attracting attention.

At the same time, I had the chance to compete in a classical piano competition that would send its winner on an international concert tour. The competition was open to classical pianists over the age of 22 in the state of Oklahoma. There were four of us.

I dusted off some old classical piano pieces, and doggone it if I didn’t win the thing. Now I had a different problem. After being rejected as a classical pianist mere months earlier, I’d have to prepare a classical concert program to tour abroad.

But because of my brief hip-hop career, I knew that I didn’t have to give people exactly what they were expecting. As long as I told a good story, an audience would follow wherever I led.

Getting to Know All About You

By the time the story of this book arose, I had 10 years of practice telling stories about music. I told the stories of writing down and learning my favorite jazz pianists’ arrangements, writing funk-inspired classical music, and composing a piece to commemorate a major historical event in my hometown. But Honey, If It Wasn’t for You had the potential to be my greatest story yet.

I met Linda Feagin through one of my concerts. She was kind, gracious, and supportive, and over the course of a few years, we became good friends. Only then she revealed that her late husband, Don, was a professional songwriter. He had died of a genetic disease at a young age, and they both knew when they married that this would likely be the case.

When Don died, he left behind boxes of unfinished songs. Did I want to take a look at them? Yes I did, and I knew exactly what to look for. I wanted to find lyrics that he wrote about his wife. Then I would set them to music.

Order a copy of Barron Ryan’s Honey, If It Wasn’t for You today. 

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I Could Write a Book

I couldn’t have planned it any better. Don had written lyrics to a song about how if it weren’t for his wife, he’d have nothing to write about. It was called “Honey, If It Wasn’t for You,” and he’d left its handwritten lyrics behind when he died in 1981. Linda had never even seen them.

I set the words to music, performed the song for Linda, and received her permission to share what made the song so special. My first plan was to make a short documentary film about the story. I enjoyed popular documentary series like Chef’s Table and Formula 1: Drive to Survive and thought I could produce a similar but (much) more modest presentation of this story.

Even a short documentary would require plenty of outside expertise and funding, so I’d still have a lot of convincing to do. I wondered, How do you pitch a 40-year story in five minutes? My answer: Write it as an illustrated storybook. Then I realized, Oh, I should just do that instead.

That Would Be But Beautiful, I Know

That’s how I came to write Honey, If It Wasn’t for You. It made complete sense because I aim to do more than simply make good music. My goal is to discover and present the beauty I am uniquely positioned for. (If that sounds like a mission statement, it’s because it is.)

“Beauty is never ‘necessary,’ ‘functional,’ or ‘useful,’” Fr Alexander Schmemann writes in For the Life of the World. “And when, expecting someone whom we love, we put a beautiful tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flowers, we do all this not out of necessity, but out of love.”

That’s the sort of beauty I hope this book adds to the world. It’s about love: the love that makes for a strong marriage, a meaningful friendship, or a wonderful piece of music; and the love that makes life itself worthwhile.

*****

(A portion of this essay was adapted from Barron’s ‘Classic Meets Cool, Explained’ video. It has never been written or published as text before.)

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I think most writers must have some sort of writer’s haven where they seem to write the best.

I’ve been writing most of my life. But when I started working on a manuscript I had to suss out where my “spot,” or “spots” would be. I found that while I had my story and characters swirling in my head, I was always collecting some sort of ammunition. Walking down the sidewalk or people watching at the airport or accidentally on purpose eavesdropping on a conversation at the grocery store, I took mental notes.

During the early drafts I was in sort of a hunting and gathering mode. Then, with lots of notes and a beginning of an outline, I found I needed a place to actually put it together, ‘a room of one’s own,’ a place to process and organize my resources from the outside world. Rowling scribbled in longhand at cafes in Edinburgh. Now, you can write by voice texting into your phone waiting for kids to troop out after school, or you can find a quiet nook surrounded by books and photographs and things you love where you can think straight for a while. In my case, I looked around and tried several spots, and my favorite was my backyard gazebo.

I had been brewing an idea for my book for a long while, but like everyone who first starts to think about writing, other tasks had been more important. When I finally settled into a novel generating workshop in Boston, that’s where things began to take shape. As I sat in class the first day, I remember looking around the small classroom at the other students, their tattered notebooks, peeling stickers on the back of laptops, the whiteboard with red and blue story arc graphs zig zagging up and down, hearing the rattle of the old building’s heat kick on, a chill ran through me. I had a feeling that I rarely get. I was where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing. As I continued workshopping my manuscript and signed up for more and more classes, I realized there really is something to these workshops that force you to focus, with instruction, on the intricacies of building the structure of a novel.

I also took the advice of many who said to structure some sort of routine, to try to work every day even if it’s just for 15 minutes. So, in the summertime, I commandeered the pretty gazebo in my backyard. I religiously went out with my morning coffee to the octagonal enclosure, closed the door and attempted to work. It took a while for my family to respect this trend, but I trained them . . . sort of.

In the beginning, all fired up, when following my fresh outline, and still working on some plot points, I got the delusional idea this wasn’t going to be so hard. But soon I began to suffer every stress I’ve ever heard of but never thought would plague little ol’ me. Then it began to be harder to keep to my regimen.

I began pouring my heart out to my writer friends, Art and Betsy. Telling them about my paralyzing battles in the gazebo. I was lucky to have them because most people don’t understand the confusing land of attempting to make something make-believe plausible. Eyes glaze over fast after a few pleasantries like, “Oh, that’s so nice you’re writing a book, but why can’t you play pickleball?”

After that it’s old news to them. And part of me wished I’d never mentioned writing a book because there’s nothing worse than being stuck in the weeds for weeks on a story element and someone asks, “How’s the book going?” Inside I was tormented with how hard it became to be productive and creative, to keep to my task, to write without the story feeling forced.

What I found the most confounding was how I continued despite the torturous times. Because, when there was a breakthrough or even just a teeny tiny moment that flickered a light onto a pathway to a character’s development I was once again full of purpose. I went along again like everything was fine and it didn’t seem to matter one little bit that there had been days of wanting to dump me and my manuscript into a big pile of horse manure.

Then, shortly after things got better, they got worse. I had my beginning, I had my end, I had my plot points, and conflict rising and falling. I had lots of middle stuff, but certain places were still very empty. I floundered back and forth. I could feel it… I knew there were parts that needed work, more fleshing out, more reason for being there but I couldn’t think my way through it. I’d head out to the gazebo with coffee in hand.

The gazebo is on a hill, and it has a gorgeous view. I didn’t think it was distracting . . . none of the no-window shacks like Henry Beston or Thoreau for me, I liked looking out because I’ve always felt that nature brings me a renewal of spirit. But “Gazebo Gal” suffered what I suppose is the normal, middle-book-doldrums. I would look out the windows, watch the lawn mower go back and forth, boats scoot across the bay water below me. I would drink my coffee, pat the sleeping dogs, open the windows, close the windows, I ate, and I would take a nap on the chaise. It was a disaster on and off for many days.

It made me question what the hell I was doing sitting out here as the rest of the world rolled by when some days I felt I accomplished nothing worthwhile. It made me wonder why I ever thought I could finish this project. And even worse, why did I even start it?

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The next day I’d try again. I’d sit a little, pray a little, open my laptop. Sit a little more, watch the birds, get more coffee, stare at my laptop. Write a line, erase it, watch the birds, stare at my laptop and then start looking at emails or texts and before I knew it, the day was gone . . . again.

Art and Betsy would tell me things were fine. It’s all part of the process. To keep going. “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Blah blah blah. That writing can be very magical. Sometimes, when we have flashes of insight that paint whole scenes easily, when the writing flows forth immediately it feels great but it’s very rare. Less than 10 percent of the time feels like that. The rest is just hard work. They said to get used to it—writing fiction is a rollercoaster ride.

But I have to say that now when I think about those dry spells, I believe they taught me about the internalization of the creative process. I was forced to mine down into memories and emotions to yank my characters out of the fog they were lost in, and eventually, I dreamed up their whole entire world and wrote it down.

Betsy and I had a good chat about where it comes from, this urge to create. Why do we take such pleasure in the torture it is to create for ourselves? Why do we love to experience the results of other’s vision-created endeavors like a film that makes us want to talk for hours after seeing it? Or the books we’ll read two or three times that people sweated blood over? Or that piece of art in the gallery that makes us tilt our heads and stare? Why do we relish it?

Maybe creating is about the question and not the answer. Maybe it’s about staying curious about the unknown instead of afraid of it. Maybe writing a book or creating anything is a microcosm of the struggle of life. Going blindly each day, trying to make the right decisions, totally making it up as you go and hoping something good comes out of it.

I’m working on another book. I wish I could say it gets easier. Parts of my new story, “Beulah,” are already full blown, but I’m starting to suffer the same pangs all over again. Out here in the summertime gazebo, I’m really hoping that the lessons of determination I learned before and the encouragement I got will spur me on. There’s nothing easy about writing, but I’m going to give it another go. Right after I get more coffee, pet the dogs, watch the birds, stare at my laptop, and answer some emails.

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Junior year was when I took the fiction workshop with Amy Hempel that reframed my ability to think about this distressing episode. In my notes, I recorded that Amy advised us to write from shame. This was an elaboration of the famous prompt from Gordon Lish, write the thing you did that “dismantles your own sense of yourself.” A time you did something you swore you’d never do, or the worst thing you ever did. Over the years, I’ve internalized this as an injunction to write from shame—it’s a more flexible prompt, one that goes beyond a discrete act to track with a whole lifetime.

My first novel, The Ash Family, came directly from tackling the shame of that bad friendship. The Ash Family is about a young woman who runs away from home to join an off-the-grid cult. I recognized, in the narratives of cult-followers, that part of myself—my eagerness to devote myself to a person I thought was a genius, to follow someone else’s commandments, to find safety in an unyielding, unkind structure, and to relax into a lack of agency.

For better or for worse, a necessary condition of writing from shame is intentionally forgetting that your friends and family will read the book. When it came time to publish the novel in 2019, all the honesty and intensity I put into the book came rebounding back onto me in the form of intense embarrassment. With each copy-editing pass, it got harder and harder to read what I’d written. By the time I held the finished book, I couldn’t stand to flip through the pages. Maybe I am a particularly shame-filled person, which might be why the Amy advice has resonated with me for all these years. But I also think this is part of the publication process for many writers, and one I wish we talked more about. Writing is private, intimate, solitary, but the goal of publication is to go wide. Every writer has to deal with this two-faced mandate.

My disclaimer—“It’s fiction!”—can’t vanquish my feeling of exposure. I try to keep in mind that my own shame is just an instigator for made-up characters and plots; then the logic of the work, the material, carries me someplace new. But my burning face at each and every reading reveals that there’s still a high degree of personal truth in the fiction.

The slow-moving emotional catastrophe of publishing my debut did not take away any of my belief in the importance of writing from shame. On the contrary, I’ve accepted that as the feeling that I made something of substance. Fiction is the art form that most directly lends itself toward depicting the individual mind at work, and grappling with shame sets the mind moving in high-stakes ways. I watch myself squirm and I pounce. And this is what makes fiction that excites me—fiction that is passionate, transgressive, honest.

My second novel, The Absolutes, which was just released on July 11 from Mariner, is maybe, in terms of shame-exposure, even worse than The Ash Family. It’s a novel of erotic yearning, full of explicit sex and absolutely indefensible decision-making. (The plot concerns a woman’s affair with a married Italian aristocrat.) I endowed my protagonist, Nora, with her own rifts in her sense of self, her own inexorable progress towards doing things she swore she’d never do—including destroying her own long-term relationship, hiding from friends, and skipping out on all of her responsibilities to abet marital infidelity.

Order a copy of Molly Dektar’s The Absolutes. 

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Nora’s actions harm her friends and family, while my novels—to the best of my knowledge, at least—don’t. But Nora, like me, is exploring the perplexing rewards of discomfort. She darkly dramatizes my own attempts to overcome self-doubt and fear of judgment. Shame functions as the fence around the actions we are willing to take. It defines us and confines us. In the book, Nora repeatedly chooses to push past her shame in pursuit of a higher connection. And in my attempts to depict her with honesty, I’ve written my bravest book.

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Long drives make me anxious.

I don’t like being far from home.

I push myself to travel to experience new places but I’m a homebody. I love that most of my days look the same. I’m such a creature of habit, I only wear one color—turquoise. The problem is I’m exceptionally curious and have countless questions about life.

Since I live a rather simple one, I started trying on pretend lives and traveling to imaginary places to look for answers. It actually works! If I go deep enough into these made-up minds and explore their worlds, I find real answers.

I’m not crazy. You might be wondering, then, what is my diagnosis? I am a novelist.

The French author Flaubert famously said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” It seems to work for me.

For over 25 years I’ve supplemented my ordinary days with weird characters, strange places, and riveting storylines. All this examined life in the convenience and safety of my own mind. So imagine my shock when I walked into the grocery store one afternoon and saw the character Dottie, from my novel Magdalena, standing there in produce.

“Well,” she said holding up a ripe tomato, smiling, “you’re a nice one, aren’t you?”

“Dottie?” I whispered. There in the flesh was a woman who looked and acted just like my character. Dottie, an outcast in her small town, has almost no one to talk to so she is absolutely the kind of woman who might chat with a piece of fruit.

I watched Grocery Store Dottie roll her cart to the apples. I heard her tell a bruised Fuji “not today,” before she set it back down. My God! I told myself. It’s really her. I followed her down each aisle as if pursuing a ghost. And this was the day the stalking began.

I didn’t run into her often. In a good month, I might see her twice, but then I wouldn’t see her for several weeks. Whenever I did, I’d light up like a child coming face to face with a superhero, or a teenager running into her crush. The feeling was complicated, and while I tried to be discreet as I watched her, I didn’t always succeed.

Once she narrowed her eyes at me, noticing my attention as I followed her outside to her bike. She set her grocery bag in the handlebar basket while watching me suspiciously. I pretended to look out toward the parking lot and then at my phone, as if waiting for someone. I kept up the act and she seemed to buy it. It was easy enough to dismiss me, a 50-year-old woman in jean shorts, a turquoise tank top, and Birkenstocks, acting strange but not threatening. The irony made me laugh. I was stalking her because she reminded me of my odd character and yet the real oddball was me.

I learned to be casual when I ran into her. I’d see her from the corner of my eye while pretending to read a cereal box label, or I’d stand with my back to her and just listen. She came to be an inspiration, a spark of excitement to the often tedious work of developing a novel. Each time I saw her I told myself she was like a mystical message from the universe confirming that I’m writing what I’m supposed to be writing.

With each run-in, I’d report the details to my writers group and we came to call them “Dottie Spottings.” Only my writer friends understood the innocence involved in stalking someone for the sake of a story. My husband laughed at me, and my daughter told me to leave the poor lady alone. But I couldn’t. Who in their right mind turns their back on a miracle?

When my novel Magdalena was accepted by a publisher, I no longer needed Grocery Store Dottie to keep me in the spell of the story. It was time to let her go. So one day in the juice isle, I stopped her and said, “You look so familiar.”

“Oh?” She smiled in surprise and seemed completely oblivious to the fact that I’d been watching her for years. I congratulated myself on how good of a stalker I’d become—even as I was preparing to quit.

“Were you a librarian at the old library down the street?” I asked, finally voicing the suspicion I’d had all this time, which I kept to myself so that she could remain what I needed her to be. Standing face to face with her, she didn’t look all that much like Dottie. Maybe similar in age and overall quirkiness but the details were different. Why had I chosen her? Maybe because she’d spent her career surrounded by the spirit of books? Who better than a librarian to bring my fictitious character to life.

“Oh, that was years ago,” she said. “You remember me?”

We went on to have a brief conversation and I learned her name. Getting to know the real person allowed me to let go of my illusion. I don’t follow her anymore, though when I see her, she still makes me smile. She unknowingly gave me the magic I needed to finish writing Magdalena.

Order Magdalena by Candi Sary today. 

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In my latest novel several homeless characters are teaching me new lessons about life. I am purposeful about not stalking any homeless people I see at the grocery store. Still, the universe managed to send me a message again confirming that I’m writing what I’m supposed to write. One afternoon, I found a homeless woman in my garage.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Someone sent me,” she said sort of shaking her head in confusion. “They told me to come.”

“Who?” I asked.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

She never completely explained herself. To my rational husband, she was too high on something to know what she was doing or saying. I was slower to accept his logic. In that moment I decided to believe my characters sent her. They wanted to help me better understand their complicated lives. Though the experience left me with even more questions than answers, it was exactly what I needed.

Do I literally believe that Grocery Store Dottie was a miracle, or that my characters really sent the homeless woman to me? No. But just as I love writing stories for readers, I also get a thrill telling stories to myself. With this kind of thinking, I have found that life is always an adventure. Even just staying home.

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There will be many rejections, and they’re tough going. The mere prospect of them is sometimes enough to stop you in your typing tracks. Overcoming these fears is vital. Sticking in there takes grit. Emotional grit.

Look away now if you think you can’t handle some of my tough love tips on how to build your resilience and get published…

DON’T: Think you can write.

You can’t write. Believe me, you can’t. You might have the most incredible potential—Booker prize-winning, bestseller-churning brilliance—lying dormant inside you, but when you start out, you won’t have those skills to make it happen and you WILL. GET. REJECTED. And that’s okay. Most of us aren’t born with it.

DO: Start at the beginning.

You need to learn your craft. If you don’t, agents and publishers will see straight through you. However much potential you show, they don’t have the time to hold your hand and teach you how. There are so many practical books and courses out there to help you. Find one or two and apply their wisdom. Believe me, it really is worth the effort. My top tip would be Into The Woods, by John Yorke.

DON’T: Look down.

While writing, the thought of sending it out to agents or publishers is like looking down the side of a treacherous rock face as you’re navigating the narrow ridge of a mountain. Don’t do it! This rookie mistake has two fatal outcomes: Either it causes delusional dreams of flying to the top or mind-bending catastrophizing of rag-dolling to the bottom. Basically, don’t risk psychologically derailing yourself. It can lead to writer’s paralysis and never-ending excuses for why you never finish your manuscript.

DO: Believe in happy endings.

The best way to complete your book is to enjoy the process, live in the moment, and focus on putting one step in front of the other, one little word at a time. Trick yourself into thinking that nobody in the world will ever read it. Typing ‘The End’ is the best high ever. For writers, that’s true happiness right there, all tied in a bow. Forget that it equals crunch-time. Who cares what people think? You’ve damn-well written a book! Good job!

DON’T: Blame the industry.

It’s easy to read a rejection letter from an agent or publisher and feel the rage. It’s only natural to leap to your own defense, lambast them for making a mistake, for missing its potential, for overlooking your talent or even for failing to read it properly. They’re total bloody idiots for not giving you a 10-book deal, right? I mean, look at the other crappy books they publish! How could they reject yours? This might be true. Many editors have rued the day they turned down Harry Potter. But remember this: J.K. Rowling is the exception, the rest of us are the rule.

DO: Blame yourself.

My first four manuscripts were turned down by every publisher in London. After ranting and raving about the state of the industry, I got real and blamed myself. I listened to the criticism from trusted readers, begrudgingly accepted that the experts were probably right, sat down at my computer, and wrote a better book.

DON’T: Dream big.

Being rejected by the big names in traditional publishing doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have what it takes to be a published writer. They’re not the only arbiters of the current market or the up-to-date trends of the reading public. These days, there so many varied and exciting new ways of starting out and quietly building a writing career for yourself in the digital first or self-publishing arena.

Order Clare Boyd’s The Wedding Night today. 

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DO: Think small (thumbnails).

After a rejection that might say something like, ‘We really enjoyed it, but we’re only looking for high-concept, big-hitting thrillers right now,’ I advise you to think hard about that. Be business-like about it. A practical overhaul of your ideas isn’t always a cynical exercise or a compromise. Narrowing it down and nailing your genre can be as thrilling and as ‘big-hitting’ as it gets. It can help you find your voice and transform your journey. Picture the tagline next to the tiny thumbnail photo of your book on Amazon: ‘an unputdownable, edge-of-your-seat thriller’ or ‘heart-breaking, tear-jerking romance.’ Then read every book ever written in your chosen genre.

DON’T: Believe the hype.

If you think the rejection and dejection stops when you get published, think again. You’ve got the bad reviews from readers and book bloggers to look forward to. If that isn’t enough, many authors are dropped by their publishers or agents after only a couple of books. Or maybe they fail to attain foreign rights deals or bag a TV & Film adaptation or make The Sunday Times bestseller lists. A writing career will be peppered with echoes of those original turndowns. But none of it matters. Don’t focus on the highs and lows. Instead, dig deep and remain level-headed, always checking in on why you started writing in the first place.

DO: Prove them wrong.

A mega-successful songwriter friend of mine wallpapered her attic walls with all the music industry rejection letters she received when she was just starting out. It’s a brilliant example of acceptance. Own those publisher rejections! Find a proverbial wall to stick them to and look them in the face every day! And then go write another book—if only to prove everyone wrong.

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Well, let me back up. I accidentally ended up with a writing partner (who, despite what you may think, did not write my book with me).

No wait, let me back up again. Everything that I have in life is the result of happy accidents. By which I mean that a lot of what I’ve accomplished in life is due to two things: random chance and being open to where things might lead.

When I was but a nascent scribe, a wee teen poking her deeply closeted head into the wider world, I ran a Star Trek fanfiction writing group (my nerdiness was never nascent, it’s been with me since light first stung my eyes). It was in this group I met the woman who would become my best friend in the world, my wife, and yes, my writing partner.

I was just a kid who had a million stories inside screaming to get out, and who thought writing in the Trek universe would be fab. I didn’t go looking for romance, or for lifelong friendships, or anything more than writing stories with people who had a shared interest. I also didn’t go in thinking it would ignite a spark that would lead to an entire writing career.

Years later, when my wife and I were past the cutesy awkward kisses, past the heart-rending agony of a long-distance relationship, past a skimpy tiny wedding in a small and ugly hotel ballroom that was all we could afford, I was still writing. That spark had become a nicely well-tended campfire that kept me warm during the cold, biting wind of mundane day jobs.

My wife, despite having joined said fanfic group to write, never saw herself as a fiction writer. She was a trained journalist, and thought she belonged on the nonfiction side of the line. But she was editing my writing, always the first line of defense there to tell me “This could be worded better,” or “You’re repeating yourself here,” or “This doesn’t make any sense at all, what in the world are you doing?”

But it was more than that. She was a sounding board—generating ideas, plots, and character arcs right along with me. It was so much more than editing. It was co-writing, and I told her so. And she didn’t believe me. But here we are, a team that’s been writing together for years and years now, so I get to tell you all that I won that battle and I was right and I get to do it publicly in this article! This is more than gloating, this is, like, a supergloat.

Did you know I also never thought I’d have the opportunity to do that? But the option presented itself and here I am, seizing the moment. Look how on theme I am!

I love writing with her. We complement each other remarkably well, have the exact same sensibilities and things we like (and dislike) in fiction. We’re constantly pulling apart every television show, movie, book, comic, scripted podcast, and lengthy weird articles about happy accidents, to see how they’re made. We discuss what we loved and why, and where things went wrong (in our opinion). We’re always learning and growing and bouncing ideas off of each other all day and night. Maybe that sounds exhausting to you, but it’s heaven for me.

In a thousand years I could never tell all the stories I have in my head, and I love writing and I love my wife, and so it’s basically the best thing ever. And the spark that became a campfire is now a raging wildfire, but like… a good one. This metaphor has gotten away from me. Where’s your writing partner when you need them?

Once I came out publicly as trans, I began chronicling my transition and the experience of existing as a trans woman in this world via weekly essays. Did you think I would pass up a chance for more writing? Come on, it’s like you don’t even know me. We’re almost 700 words in, we’re like besties by now.

As I was already writing about trans issues, and am not just a writer but a screenwriter, I was very quickly flooded with requests from readers to explain the trans allegories of The Matrix films. The Wachowskis had just confirmed (sort of!) that the movies were intended to explore trans themes, and everyone wanted to know what that meant.

I’d always deeply loved those movies, but hadn’t seen them since realizing I was transgender. I was excited to see them again, and figured there’d be some broad applications to the trans experience within. I’d get a good essay out of it. To my entire surprise, they went so deep into exploring the trans experience that my one essay ended up as twenty-four essays covering the entire franchise. I found that they had so many wonderful, beautiful, important things to say about trans life that it took me some 60,000 words to explain it… to help others see the glowing, sparkly magic I saw lurking just under the surface (though just as often it sprinkles its badass fairy dust right in your face).

And so despite being a girl who only ever wanted to write fiction, and thought she’d be doing so alone, and not sure she’d ever find the perfect collection of conscious atoms to share her life with, and who didn’t even know (or couldn’t consciously admit) she was a girl for far too long… I ended up a woman who wrote a nonfiction book on her own (that was heavily edited by her wife first, natch… old habits die hard). It’s called Begin Transmission: the trans allegories of The Matrix, and it’s out June 27, 2023. If you enjoy the tone of this article you’re gonna love it (if not, look, I’ve got nothing for you).

Order Begin Transmission: the trans allegories of The Matrix by Tilly Bridges today. 

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I didn’t mean to write a book. I didn’t even want to! They’re just so many words, folks. I’m primarily a screenwriter for a reason: laziness (I kid! This is a joke. I am good at jokes.). I didn’t mean to write nonfiction. I didn’t mean to create a fanfic group to find a best friend and the love of my life.

But all of that happened because I kept myself open to the possibilities. If I’m honest, that’s how I finally accepted my transness, too. Sure, I was scared of what I might find if I looked deep inside, but then thought… what if it’s good? Don’t you at least want to know?

What if that person you just met might end up being the love of your life? What if that person you love talking story with could be the writing partner of your dreams? What if your next great story idea is one delightful chance happening away?

Happy accidents are everywhere. All you gotta do is be open to them. And then you, too, can accidentally write a book.*

*This declaration is not guaranteed, no substitutions allowed, void where prohibited.

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We should just give up.

Stop writing. Let Coleen Hoover and James Patterson and ChatGPT just write all the books.

But that’s not true. We need stories from as many diverse backgrounds as possible because that’s what humans crave. For as many copies James Patterson has sold there are just as many people who have never read one of his books. You should write your book because you’re not James Patterson.

Of course, that imposter syndrome voice is always there and it’s always going to say the same things. So it’s time to combat that with logic, because if imposter syndrome is anything, it’s illogical.

Am I boring?

First off, yes. Absolutely. Everyone is boring including you. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, what can we do about it? Basically nothing. Because everyone is boring to someone.

You could write the most thrilling, exciting adventure full of romance and intrigue that wins multiple awards and becomes a bestseller. But there are still going to be people who say: “Oh, it was such a slog to read. How many car chases do you really need?” and you’re going to be like: “One! There was only the one!”

You could also write a book about a lonely widow who goes to the supermarket every Tuesday. And people will say: “Oh my God! We get it! She goes to the supermarket!” But there are going to be plenty of people who read and connect with your writing in the way you meant. They’re going to see how you made the produce a metaphor for life and how the characters staring into the freezers in the frozen food section are still looking for human connection.

Those readers are going to cry and realize all of the work you put into this book and when they finish, they’re going to immediately find all the other books you wrote and buy them. Those are your people. Write for them. Be boring for them!

Has this story already been told?

Of course it has! Every story has already been told. Terminator and The Matrix are the same story: AI take over the world and a chosen one is going to save humanity but an unfeeling machine is hunting them down. Deep Impact and Armageddon are about astronauts going into space to blow up an extinction-level space rock, and they came out in the same year. Avatar is Dances with Wolves with blue people!

Everything old is new again. But your story is different because you wrote it. Out of the above examples, there might be one that people prefer, but there are plenty of people who like both. If a similar idea comes out before your book is written, keep going.

Finish writing the story the way you imagined it and hope that other one does well. Because the fans of that story will then find yours. And then you get to pitch your book with “Grocery Store Widow is perfect for fans of Shopping Mall Single Dad!”

Am I a terrible writer?

Absolutely not! You thought I was going to say yes and have something clever to say about how we’re all terrible writers, didn’t you? Well we aren’t! That’s the imposter syndrome talking!

We’re all great writers because we write what moves us. We write what we want to read. That’s why we write those stories that we’re worried are boring or feel familiar. There’s no such thing as a ‘terrible writer’—except maybe five-year-olds. Five-year-olds are awful writers, but they’re new and still learning.

Think about the worst book you ever read. You probably think that writer is terrible, but someone bought that book. You may have even bought that book! You don’t like their voice or their writing style, but that doesn’t make them a terrible writer.

Order Lose You to Find Me by Erik J. Brown today.

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So how do I shut imposter syndrome up forever?

Great question! Let me know when you find out. I think the answer is you never will. If you become an instant New York Times bestseller you’re still going to feel like an imposter. You’ll show up to a book event with a line out the door and wonder ‘Why are all these people here?’ You’ll sign a contract for your next three books and the whole time you’ll be waiting for your publisher to change their mind and rescind their offer. You’ll never be able to shut up imposter syndrome forever, but you can tell it to go away for now.

If you’re pre-publication, remind yourself why you write. If you’ve just published your first book, hold it in your hands and remember how proud you are of it—and if you aren’t you should be! If your fifth book is about to come out and you’re scared it won’t find its audience, just know there are people who pre-order your books as soon as you announce them. If you’re James Patterson, reach out to your ghostwriters and remind them they did a great job!

Imposter syndrome comes to bother all of us, we just need to sometimes embrace it with logic and get it to go away. At least until the next time we’re successful and it rears its ugly head.

Also, I changed my mind, ChatGPT is the only terrible writer.

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