There is just so much to say about reading it’s been almost painful to publish so little—even though it’s been thousands and thousands of words! We will be learning to read critically as editors (“first readers”) beginning in January, and moving on (at least for now) from the “learning to read” as lovers of books and humanity series. But, I wanted to add a few more thoughts about how to source new books to read and some other ideas that I don’t want to miss. Just running through these thoughts—I even numbered them for helpful numbering!

What if the self wants to trust itself, just as much as it is human to want to trust in others and be trusted? What if we are constantly bending the self away from its most relaxed, productive state of trust? What if self-confidence is as much a virtue as having confidence in our fellow human beings? Every time you don’t write because you’re “not a writer,” when you turn away from a shitty first draft because it’s not yet Nabokov, when you refuse to share your work with anyone—somewhere inside us the self calls out, how can I earn your trust if you won’t trust me to try?

I could smell a test when it was put in front of me. I analyzed his question and what was behind it. What did this young man want from me? What smirking assumptions was he carrying against me? To fight them, my answer would have to cut. Should I say the toughest poet I knew of? Should the poet I like the most be the one with the radicalest politics? If I said a woman poet, it would betray even more vulnerability—you only like her because you are a woman, too! If I said a man poet, it would show I was ignorant—you only know about him because he’s on the syllabus! I knew my answer would be wrong no matter what. This was a test I was going to fail.

Near the end of the summer, there was a sudden tragedy. Something that had never happened before and will never happen again, a singular event that changed everything. When something shocking happens, the shock is so much an experience of not-knowing. Your body knows what happened, but your brain doesn’t believe it. When you try to comprehend, a white wall appears, hiding all the language you know behind it, and the language you need is buried underneath. You don’t know what to do or say, and you don’t know why, and you don’t know what happened, and you don’t know what will happen next.

What do you think it means to read? Well, basically, reading means to comprehend the meaning of symbols. But in what ways? Is the meaning of the symbols always shared, or fixed? Are there different ways to read a symbol or combinations of symbols? Sometimes this reading involves simultaneous telling—is reading also translation? What is the role of the decipherer to the nature of the puzzle? Questions like these emerged as the meaning of “to read” evolved over hundreds of years.

I discovered through my early work as an editor, and as a teacher during my MFA program, that the craft itself—the words, the syntax, the style, the structure—was an avenue to uncovering the deeper misunderstandings and limitations, as well as the true beliefs, resources, and gifts, of the writer. Most editors don’t really work that way—it’s not about investigating the source of the chosen language and discovering wellsprings of new inspiration for the writer. It’s usually about assignments, deadlines, and upholding the expectations and standards of a publication.

Specificity breeds trust as well as good writing. Keep this in mind as well when you’re doing your weaving. If you ‘became disillusioned in my high-achieving corporate 9-5,’ tell me actually a story about how that happened or what that really feels like, to be disillusioned. If you went to Harvard, tell me something that happened there that shows me something about your values, or tell me how it sits in contrast to how you see the world today.

Instead of just throwing some brief lines up on your site that show off your most impressive achievements and a couple of awkward ‘fun facts,’ slow down and dive in to what the bio could be. I’ve seen this process define and transform the businesses of my writing clients, helping coaches clarify their niche, creators understand their mission, and founders determine the depth of their own positioning.

You might picture the oak out back of your childhood home, the one you fell off of when you were ten. Or the willow standing behind you on your wedding day. The one you planted in remembrance of someone. The giant you saw pulled up by its roots after that storm. Or the one in whose buried roots float the bones of your old dog. It could be a dream tree, not out of any memory. You might have no idea where it comes from. It could be the tree of an alien planet. It’ll be something I could never imagine.

It’s true, the best thing about the MFA for your writing is that someone has given you an assignment and expects you to turn it back in—your writing time is the priority. This is your job, to write, for this amount of time, and that may be all you get. But why wait to be told to prioritize the time? You might not be able to turn writing into your main job, but think about why you don’t prioritize your writing now—do you feel guilty? Would it be a relief to have someone with authority tell you to use your time writing? You will probably never, ever get that. These institutional hang-ups are old-fashioned and based on nothing. Be your own authority; no permission needs to be given, you are already free.

When you get stuck in the prison of thought, check in on what you want! Stuck on articulating an idea, on phrasing that doesn’t feel right, on decisions about how to write the ending, or what story vessel to board, on so many decisions on and off the page—it’s easy to get trapped in what we think, figuring out what we think, or should think, or should be able to think, and forget to remember (or to ask) what we simply want.

We return to the blank page, to the journal, to yesterday’s words. Again and again we come back to where we are. We return to the craft. We return to the same ideas, memories, themes, the same questions, sometimes the same conclusions. We return to projects we’ve started and stopped for reasons we don’t even know. For years and lifetimes we return to the same stories, which imprison us when we can’t see how to change them, which liberate us when we can’t help but.

Sketches can help you come up with and test out different kinds of shapes, connections, ideas, and transitions before you commit to a direction—it costs more of your time and energy to correct course later on, once you’ve poured your heart into the prose or hauled ass on a bunch of research. You artists out there probably sketch in pencil before you start working with the expensive paints, right?

We are drafting a blog post, a newsletter or dispatch, an essay, or whatever your writing project might be. This series will be most helpful for shorter-form nonfiction; drafting parts of a book is a much more bespoke process that considers timeline, research components, and many other elements that need to be integrated to sustain a long-term writing project—I’ll cover all that some time down the line. But the concepts and exercises here will still be useful, no matter what you’re working on. It’s all arrows in your quiver, stuff you can use whenever it’s useful to you.

M had been struggling with his first drafts—his free writing wasn’t free at all. There was nothing ‘wrong’ with the early drafts he was handing in, but he seemed to be reaching for a voice that wasn’t his own. Beyond that, he was struggling with the blank page. In conversation his ideas were big and clear and unspooled without end, yet he was stuck getting any of that down in writing. If something didn’t change in how he was approaching the void, he would have to tackle the near-impossible task of back-engineering his own voice.

One night soon after I’d unpacked, I turned on the gas stove and tossed some garlic in a little olive oil on the cast iron—one of the most powerful, comforting, delicious, recognizable aromas in the world, right? The total fact that I couldn’t smell it at all hit me like a wall of nothing. I just stood there saying, “Ahh!” for a minute, then I kind of ran around the room in a circle waving my arms. The garlic burned on the fire and no one was there to tell me.

One of the reasons this writer has been so successful at her outline so quickly is because she’s telling a story that she has lived, and the lessons she’s sharing are many of the things she teaches professionally (and because we went through all the steps in this series, of course). She’s writing through ideas she’s been thinking about a long time, and can quickly identify the things she knows and needs to know.

Here’s an easy way to tell whether your thinking is unclear or just needs to be translated to the language of the written word—can you say it? This is what I ask whenever people tell me, “I can’t write it down clearly!” If you know it’s clear in your head, but you can’t write it, see if you can say it. This proves that your thinking can be clear without your writing being clear yet. That’s because writing, in addition to being a conversation, is also a skill of translation—we focus on how we are expressing the thing we feel or think, not trying to capture it directly, but as closely as possible.

Someone had dragged me out on the wood from the bunks to collect some sun, with bare legs and a long-sleeved windbreaker strapping me to the bridge like a Posey vest, and as I lay there pieces of the last few days gurgled on the grease slick of my brain, catching me up to the reality I was now in—me, bent like a doll over the gunwale, cutting open water with my own guts, dialogue wrapping like eels around my head, something about letting it pass.

And, as a spiritual practice and a way of being in the world, writing can make us more empathetic, more connected, less egotistical and narcissistic, and less urgently concerned with trapping and freezing our personal identity. Writing as a spiritual practice connects you to yourself, the world, the present, and what’s possible, and is against ego for its constraining effects on the imagination.