The Writing Life
A sermon requires you to already be in the room. You have to show up. You have to be open to receiving what is being delivered. You have to have enough relationship with the source that you will sit still long enough to hear it. For a lot of people — especially people who have...
Letters To Nobody
I remember when a disagreement could end with both people still standing. Not because someone won. Because both people had actually said what they meant and heard what the other person meant and arrived somewhere that felt more complete than where they started. Not always agreement. Sometimes just understanding. The recognition that two people could...
Letters To Nobody
I want to talk about the people who can do it. Not the people who say sorry without meaning it. Not the people who offer a qualified admission designed to spread the blame thin enough that they are only technically responsible for a fraction of it. The actual people. The ones who can look at...
The Writing Life
I want you to put the book down and sit with it for a minute. Not because you are confused. Because something landed and you need a moment before you move on to the next thing. I want there to be a residue. A weight. Something the story left in you that was not there...
Letters To Nobody
Being wrong is not the same as being bad. Most people know this intellectually. Almost nobody behaves like they believe it. Watch what happens when someone is confronted with clear evidence that they were mistaken about something. In the rare person who is genuinely secure the response is simple. Oh. I did not know that....
Letters To Nobody
I spent a long time trying to find the right words. The right tone. The right moment. The right approach that would finally get through to a person who had never been able to hear me no matter how carefully I spoke. I adjusted my delivery. I softened my language. I picked better times. I...
The Writing Life
I know exactly who I wrote Black Water for. It is the person who is talented in ways that nobody around them has noticed. Who has gifts that are sitting unused because the noise of everything that went wrong is louder than the signal of everything they were built to do. Who has been told...
Letters To Nobody
I want to talk about something that has been happening so gradually and so consistently that most people stopped noticing it years ago. Turn on almost any sitcom from the last twenty years. Find the married couple. Watch how they interact. The husband is confused. Lovably incompetent. Well-meaning but perpetually a step behind. He makes...
Letters To Nobody
Nobody argues in a vacuum. The way a person handles conflict is not random. It was learned. Absorbed. Built up over years from watching how the people around them fought, from the media they consumed, from the models of communication they were exposed to before they had the critical distance to evaluate them. Feed a...
The Writing Life
I end chapters on edges. Not every chapter. But most of them. A question that is not answered. A decision that has been made but whose consequences have not arrived yet. A door that just opened into a room the reader has not seen. Something that makes putting the book down feel like leaving in...