Category: Writing

I spent three years in a windowless editorial office watching talented writers pour their souls into manuscripts that died on page four because they were too busy being “literary” to be readable. Every writing workshop I’ve ever attended treats how to hold a reader’s attention like some mystical, divine spark that you either possess or you don’t, usually accompanied by a lecture on “finding your voice.” It’s absolute nonsense. Attention isn’t a gift from the gods; it’s a negotiation. If you aren’t providing a reason for the reader to turn the page every few hundred words, they aren’t “lost in…

I spent three hours last Tuesday staring at a manuscript that had “brilliant” ideas, but they were scattered like loose change on a sidewalk. The author had used every “furthermore,” “moreover,” and “in addition” in the English language, yet the logic still felt like a series of disconnected jumps. People treat transitions like decorative lace—something you stitch onto a sentence to make it look pretty—but that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how transitions carry an argument. If your logical connective tissue is weak, no amount of sophisticated vocabulary will stop an editor from marking your work as incoherent. I’m not here…

I spent three weeks in 2004 staring at a blinking cursor, trying to engineer a “poignant, life-altering epiphany” for a client’s memoir, only to realize I was chasing a ghost. Most writing guides treat the final chapter like a spiritual awakening, but let’s be honest: if you’re struggling with how to write endings, it’s rarely because you lack soul; it’s because you’ve lost the structural thread. You’ve spent two hundred thousand words building a house, and now you’re standing in the driveway wondering why the front door doesn’t lead anywhere. An ending isn’t a magical burst of inspiration—it is the…

I once sat in a windowless office in Bloomsbury, staring at a manuscript that had spent forty pages describing the exact shade of a character’s curtains. The author had clearly spent weeks obsessing over “atmosphere,” but they had completely forgotten that an editor’s attention span is a finite, expensive resource. Most writing guides will tell you to focus on “voice” or “setting,” but they rarely mention that if you don’t learn how to write an opening that works, you are essentially just burning your own time. An opening isn’t a place to decorate; it is a contractual obligation to prove…

I once spent three days staring at a manuscript for a high-level fintech CEO, a man who clearly believed that if a sentence didn’t contain at least four syllables per word, he wasn’t being paid enough to write it. He wasn’t communicating; he was performing expertise, burying his actual insights under a landslide of “synergistic paradigms” and “leveraged scalability.” Most writing gurus will tell you to just “simplify,” but they never mention the paralyzing fear that if you stop using the industry shorthand, you’ll suddenly look like an amateur. They don’t realize that learning how to avoid jargon without losing…

I spent the better part of my third year in publishing staring at a manuscript that used three adjectives where a single, sharp verb would have done the job—and then I watched the author wonder why their developmental edit fee was so high. There is this persistent, expensive myth that “writing well” requires a certain kind of literary fog, a layer of precious, winding prose that signals intelligence. It doesn’t; it just signals a lack of discipline. Most people think learning how to write clearly is about finding the perfect, most sophisticated word in the thesaurus, but in my twenty-one…

I once spent three days staring at a manuscript for a mid-list memoir, nursing a lukewarm latte and wondering why my brain felt like it was being sanded down by a coarse-grit sandpaper. The prose wasn’t “bad” in the traditional sense—the grammar was fine, the spelling was impeccable—but every single sentence was the exact same length. It was a relentless, metronomic thud that made me want to walk directly into the sea. Most writing guides will tell you that rhythm is some mystical, ethereal gift bestowed upon the inspired, but they’re lying to you. In reality, understanding how sentence rhythm…

I once spent three days staring at a single, stubborn page in a memoir manuscript, nursing a lukewarm latte and wondering if I’d finally lost my edge. The client was paying a premium day rate, but no amount of money makes a broken sentence feel any less like a personal insult. You’ve likely been there: you’re circling the same three ideas, polishing the adjectives until they shine with a fake, hollow light, yet you still haven’t figured out how to fix a paragraph that will not work. Most writing gurus will tell you to “find your muse” or “wait for…

I spent three years in a windowless office in Bloomsbury watching authors mistake “more” for “better,” convinced that if they just added another thousand words of flowery description, they might finally justify their advance. It is the most expensive mistake you can make. Most writing gurus will tell you to “find your voice” or “embrace the flow,” but if you want to actually finish a project that doesn’t make an editor weep, you need to learn how to cut your own writing before someone else does it for you—and usually for a much higher hourly rate. I’m not here to…

I once sat in a windowless office in Bloomsbury, staring at a manuscript that had been “revised” by a writer who clearly thought that adding more adjectives was the same thing as fixing a broken plot. They’d spent three months polishing sentences that were structurally hollow, treating their prose like a piece of fine china instead of the unreliable scaffolding it actually was. Most writing gurus will tell you that revision is about finding your “voice” or waiting for a divine spark, but that’s expensive nonsense that leads to nothing but endless, aimless tinkering. If you want to learn how…