I came at writing the hard way. But I’m not special. Every writer comes to their work that way. Writing–fiction, non-fiction, poetry, screenwriting–is difficult, and there is no single road to…I’m reluctant to finish with the word success because success always means different things to different people. Many writers start out quite young, pouring …Read More

  Chocolate Won’t Get You Unstuck: This Writer’s Internal Dialogue About Food.   Me: You have this weird habit that I don’t understand. Me, too: Which one? I have a lot of weird habits. Me: You’ll be sitting there at your desk, concentrating on a paragraph or a page or on whatever it is that …Read More

  I write about ghosts, so people often ask me if I believe in them. Of course I believe in ghosts. My real life experience with them is limited, I think, because I want it to be. Even though the one compelling experience I’ve had was pleasant and benign—a smiling, elderly man in a rumpled …Read More

Somewhere back in my years’ worth of blogs, I know I’ve written about Julia Cameron’s classic book on creativity, THE ARTIST’S WAY. It’s been a few years since I read the book and completed its intense series of exercises, but the habits I learned from it have stuck with me for the most part. One habit …Read More

      I spend a lot of time evaluating the relative value/usefulness of things. I want just the right tool at the proper time–but it shouldn’t be extravagant or wasteful. Comparison and criticism are nasty bedfellows. In the past I have silently judged infrequent cooks for buying $300 dutch ovens, when I know my …Read More

  I have one Instagram account and I’ve been thinking about making another one just for photographs of the 12 acres on which we live. There is so much richness in even just a single acre—in even a few square feet—that it would be cheating, because even if I tried, I would never be able to take …Read More

    Every book I write has its own special backstory: the way it came about, the books I read or films I watched while writing it, what was going on in my marriage, my diet, or inside my head. I can make all the plans I like (though I never write to a strict …Read More