“Successful travel writing mediates between two poles: the individual physical things it describes, on the one hand, and the larger theme that it is ‘about’ on the other. That is, the particular and the universal. A travel book will make the reader aware of a lot of things — ships, planes, trains, donkeys, sore feet,…
1) A journal forces you to think clearly about the day “The journal calmed me and forced me to think clearly about the day. Often the day had been muddled with so many things happening one after another that the only way to straighten it out was to write about it, reliving it until the…
The following is adapted from a lecture in my July 2017 screenwriting class at the Paris Writing Workshop. 1. All characters must suffer. No Game of Thrones character avoids misery. How they deal with suffering is how we learn who they are. 2. Obligation must be at odds with desire. No Game of Thrones character…
“As a writer you have only one job: to make the reader turn the page. Of all the tools a writer uses to make a reader turn the page, the most essential is the plot. It doesn’t matter if the plot is emotional, intellectual, or physical — as long as it compels the reader to…
From Off Assignment’s recurring feature devoted to the letters that travel writers pen during their earliest hours in alien lands, Rolf shares a 2000 letter he wrote to his new Belgian girlfriend from Laos.
Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for…
1) Confessing and confiding are overlapping concepts Confessing and confiding are overlapping concepts, like envy and jealousy, often used interchangeably, but distinct at their cores. The fundamental difference between them is that a confession, in the word’s historical, nonliterary sense, is addressed to some entity—God, the court, the public, a person one has wronged. That…
Don’t be afraid of dying. The glass of water Is quickly poured into the waiting goblet. Your face that will be of no further use to mirrors Grows more and more transparent, nothing is hidden. It’s night in the remotest provinces of the brain, Seeing falls back into the great sea of light. How strange…
“In most cultures, stories entail causality and goals, and so that’s what listeners expect when they hear a story. This expectation is so strong that the listener will use them when remembering the story, even if the story lacked these elements.” –Daniel T. Willingham “The Privileged Status of Story” (2004) “By telling stories, you objectify…
She hated a mown lawn. Maybe that was because mow was the reverse of wom, the beginning of the name of what she was—a woman. A mown lawn had a sad sound to it, like a long moan. From her, a mown lawn made a long moan. Lawn had some of the letters of man,…
Exactly twenty years ago I was entering my fourth month of living as an expatriate English teacher in Pusan (a.k.a. Busan) South Korea. This was my first experience of living in another country, and those first few months were difficult — partly because of culture shock, partly because of what-the-hell-am-I-doing-in-life mid-twenties crisis, and partly because…
