Every couple of years I go through this thing where I do a comprehensive, fearless, (sort of) and searching inventory of my career choices as a means to figuring out how to have more time for creative projects. There’s always a combination of a couple of good self-help books, a couple of friends with some honest, smart, advice, a day job that’s driving me crazy, some weird thing in the zeitgeist, a tv show that blew my mind, or etc. I just take it all out and look at it and try to figure out how to live a better, truer life.
I could look at it as I never get it right, or I could look at it as I am glad that I reflect and iterate as a habit. It depends on the day.
In any case, I always come back to the same answer:
I’m a writer—a storyteller. I wake up every morning looking for stories, spend my day looking for the patterns and pieces of stories, and go to sleep at night and dream in half-woven plots and characters and bits of dialog.
Whether I want to be or not.
Whether it makes money or not.
Whether anyone else thinks I’m a writer or not.
It just is what it is.
This Notebook is dedicated to that process—to what it means to be a writer and practice the craft. It’s a behind-the-scenes look for my readers and a bearing witness to my own process for me.
I hope you like it, and I hope you find things to inspire you in it.
Stuff That Made Me Go 👀
From the book Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. That bit about “the job itself could be a distraction” is . . . oof.
From a friend—I’m learning stuff from tech innovators about how not to be too precious about releasing work-in-progress. It’s such a balance
From my kid . . .
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