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19 articles
I spent a summer afternoon feeding my childhood favorites to my niece, expecting a victory lap through my own taste. Instead, she handed me the harshest and most useful note I've ever gotten about the writer I've become.
I posted the worst thing I've ever written to an online critique forum and braced for carnage. What I got instead was a masterclass in voice, humility, and the strange kindness of internet strangers with strong opinions.
I handed my weekend over to the Netflix algorithm — no skipping, no second-guessing, no veto power. What I got back was a mirror I didn't ask for.
I kept a running journal while rewatching the show that wrecked me at twelve — every gasp, every eye-roll, time-stamped like a lab report. Then I compared it to what I swore I remembered feeling. Turns out my memory has been ghostwriting my childhood.
I muted my comfort show for seven days to see what the silence would teach me about physical storytelling. What I found in all that quiet was a masterclass in how dialogue actually gets written — and it's now reshaping every script I touch.
I've spent years pulling my favorite shows apart to see how they tick. Last week, I put the scalpel down and just watched — and it turns out I'd been missing the whole point.
Ten years after writing my first pilot, I opened the doc with one hand covering my eyes. What I found wasn't just bad dialogue and a plot that forgot to exist — it was a younger me making surprisingly confident choices I'm still trying to live up to.
I queued up the series finale that wrecked me in 2015, half-expecting it to feel smaller this time. It didn't. It just broke me in a different place, because I'm a different person now.
I spent a weekend rewatching my most beloved series with the director's commentary on, expecting a fun trivia tour. Instead, I got a masterclass in invisible decision-making — and an uncomfortable question about how much of my own process I've been hiding from readers.
Somewhere between the third "lmaooo" and the perfectly timed "he's doing his best," I realized my friends and I had been workshopping comedy for years without calling it that. Here's my case for the group chat as the most underrated writers' room in America.
Last month I streamed a movie I hadn't seen since I was nine, expecting a nostalgia hit. Instead, I got an uncomfortable, wonderful audit of my entire creative brain. Turns out the stories we love before we know we're choosing them never really leave — they just move in and start decorating.
Every time a book, show, or movie ends for real, my brain quietly opens a document and starts drafting the sequel nobody asked for. Here's what I've figured out about why we can't let finished stories stay finished — and whether that's a bug or the whole point.
Every writer has a filter, even if they've never written it down. Mine is a short, ruthless checklist of questions that has quietly killed dozens of bad ideas — and rescued a few good ones that almost didn't make it past the velvet rope.
For a month, I outsourced my entire reading life to the staff picks shelf at my neighborhood indie bookstore. Somewhere between the novel I'd never have grabbed and the essay collection that wrecked me, I remembered what curation actually is.
Twenty-six years old, one brutal editorial letter, and a decade of deciding which notes to keep. Here's how I finally learned to hear criticism without either collapsing or building a wall.
Years of workshop notes rolled off me like rain on a windshield. Then one comment from someone I'll never meet again stopped me mid-scroll and rearranged everything I thought I knew about my own writing. Here's why feedback from people who owe us nothing hits the hardest.
Every writer has a graveyard of half-started ideas, and mine has a filing system. I finally opened it up — the screenplay outline, the pilot that died in act two, the pitch I never sent — and asked the question I'd been avoiding: why did each one stall?
On the drafts I've buried, the one that accidentally went semi-viral, and the small rituals that keep me writing when the inner critic gets loud. Spoiler: I still don't love everything I make, and that's sort of the point.
I've seen The Office more times than I've seen my own family. Here's why I've stopped apologizing for it — and why science says you should too.