Stories, craft, and a personal point of view
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.
I can write a scene that makes strangers cry, and yet at a dinner party last month I said "so there's this guy" and lost the room in nine seconds. Here's my honest breakdown of why oral storytelling and written storytelling are actually two different crafts.
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.
Prestige TV didn't invent the addictive serialized arc — radio dramas were hooking audiences episode to episode in the 1940s. What my grandmother's daily listening rituals taught me about the original writers' room.
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.
I spent one week documenting every single thing I did instead of writing, from color-coding a story bible nobody asked for to researching 1970s bus schedules for a scene that takes place on a bus for exactly one paragraph. Spoiler: the rituals might actually be part of the work.
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?
My grandmother told the same six stories for thirty years, and I never once got bored — because they were never actually the same. A look at what oral storytelling taught me about pacing, audience, and why repetition is a feature, not a bug.
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.
From a stubborn orphan detective to a quietly devastating sitcom side character, these are the characters who installed themselves in my psyche and never left. A character study of sorts — except the character being studied is me.
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.
Forget the MFA reading list. These five scenes — from Breaking Bad to a certain Pixar opening — taught me more about structure, subtext, and character than any workshop ever did.