Behind the Book: Collision with Andromeda
Collision with Andromeda sat unfinished for eight years. Here is the story behind a novel told partly from the point of view of a galaxy, and the lonely mind at its heart.
Tag: Storytelling
Why a story lands. The one somebody is afraid to write, the one that saved a life, and what happens to a culture when the stories stop being trusted.
griefBehind the Book: Buttercup
I spent almost twenty years unable to write about my marriage to Claudia. The book only worked once I stopped telling it and let Buttercup, our cat, tell it instead.
AIAI Cannot Give You the One Thing Only You Have
Ask for an illustrative example and you get a plausible composite. Plausible composites are exactly what readers stop believing.
Book MarketingThe Year the Mirror Cracked
Hold two facts together. Audiences rewarded films that looked like the actual country, and the industry made fewer of them. The UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report is the closest thing American film has to an honest mirror, and in 2025 it…
MemoirSix of My Own Stories That Looked Like Nothing and Carried a Book
None of these felt like stories when they happened. A brick in a doorway. A microwave on the wrong network. Each one ended up carrying a chapter.
Book WritingYou Have More Material Than You Think. You Are Just Not Counting It.
Almost everybody who tells me they have no stories tells me three in the next ten minutes. They do not count them because nothing dramatic happened.
GhostwritingA Dancer With a Bone Through Her Nose Taught Me How to Ghostwrite
A bold and wildly creative dancer with a bone through her nose and tattoos that once made my conservative side shudder. We became friends.
nonfictionBuild the Chapter Around the Story, Not the Other Way Round
A chapter is a building, and most writers treat the story as the paint. The test is removal. Take the story out and see whether the chapter still stands.
nonfictionNonfiction Works Best When It Is Written With Emotion
A thermometer tells you the temperature of a room. It does not tell you whether anybody wants to be in it. Most nonfiction reads like a thermometer.
fiction writingThe Unreliable Narrator: How It Works and When to Use It
Few moments in reading match the jolt of realizing your narrator has been lying to you. Done well, it turns a reader into a detective and a straight plot into a labyrinth of doubt. Done badly, it just feels like…
Book WritingHow to Write a Political Book That Inspires Voters
The political books that move elections do not read like policy papers; they read like someone who gets what you are going through and has a plan, the policy wrapped in story, conviction, and direct address. After 54+ books in…
Personal StoryYour Vote Is a Chapter in the Bigger Story
After losing Georgia by 55,000 votes in 2018, Stacey Abrams spent two years telling one story, not about herself, but about 340,000 purged voters. By 2020 the state flipped by 11,779 votes. Policy did not do that; narrative did. Here…