Practical Alphabet

Note-taking is one of the most important parts of writing, and yet it goes largely unmentioned. Dialog with self happens on the page. Figuring out your questions and the range of answers and then narrowing down to what you’ll pick and moving forward: all of this happens in scribbled jottings, in dicated-to-phone notes.

M is for Mantra My mantra is: This is the way it is. Radical acceptance. Not an easy stance. This is the way it is. This is the way it is. The coffee table is covered in graphic novels. The dinner table is covered in crumbs. The kitchen is half-clean and the windows are dirty.

“To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.” Akira Kurosawa This is quite a commitment. To stay awake and aware. To look when perhaps you might prefer to look away. That social gesture, also a gesture of self-preservation, to avert the eyes, glance away, not see. As I write this, my dog is

Writing is a physical activity, not only in the small, all-important motion of your hands. For you can dictate your writing: Henry James dictated to a secretary; it’s easier these days, when you can dictate into your phone. But not only there, either, in your breath, the movement of your mouth, is writing a physical

The movement of your story comes from the way you stack your images, whose creation we discussed in I is for Imagery. Readers–whIch is to say, human beings–create story the ways kids play with blocks. Give a reader two images and she’ll find a way to connect them, determine some possible relationship between them. If indeed

Part of what brings up resistance to write is that writing asks you to switch to a sensory mode, to track the progress of the world or a scene through sights, smells, tastes, textures and sounds. Collectively, we discuss these as “imagery,” taking the word beyond its visual limitations. In this expanded sense, “imagery” is

When something is a habit, you don’t think about it. You don’t have a conversation with yourself about whether or not to do it each day. It’s routine, nearly automatic. The next right thing. Once you left the drama of, “Will I write? When will I write? How much will I write? How will I

Once you’ve written and rewritten, there will come a point–early or late, depending on your personality, when you must have readers. Early: I love to write and immediately read aloud what I’ve written. I find I have not got nearly any idea what I’ve written until I hear it with an audience. Scrawls on the