Whatever

The Big Idea: John Wiswell

Posted on July 17, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      Leave a Comment

We all hear voices in our brain, but what if they were coming from your other heads?!? Author John Wiswell’s main character is a multi-headed dragon with a lot of contradicting opinions. Though a dragon, you may find his inner turmoil more relatable than you’d expect. Take flight in his Big Idea for The Dragon Has Some Complaints.

JOHN WISWELL:

A dragon is a lot like ADHD.

I’ve always loved dragons. How can you not like dragons? They’re like if someone glued all the cool parts of dinosaurs together and then let them barf fire. Anyone who’s ever been stuck in traffic admires the incendiary nature of dragons.

Most interesting to me are many-headed dragons. They’re referenced in ancient Greek classics, suggesting we’ve always had such things on our minds. Yet in most stories, the many-headed dragon is just a single-minded critter with more mouths that they can use to bite the protagonist. You’re lucky if one head on a dragon’s shoulders gets a personality. Much less all of them.

In one fundamental way, dragons being treated as though they have no intelligence is similar to the experience of those of us with ADHD. We are spoken about like we aren’t human beings, but rather are a cognitive condition with legs, which needs medication in order to be talked about as a person. As though we have no creativity or insight until we sit still. I’ve done this dance since I was a little kid with too many books open at once on my floor. It only got worse once I got a browser and started opening tabs.

Writing a many-headed dragon gave me a great outlet for reflecting on how my brain works. Garrodigh, my dragon, would have several heads with distinctly different opinions about what to do with his wings. He’d at once be a singular “he” and a plural “they,” both true, just circumstantial. 

The head growing out of his bottom-most neck, named Bottomhead, is basically a feral animal, focusing on sunbathing and lunch. He’s the sort of creature who would chase a cannonball across the island to bite it.

In the middle, Centerhead is a curmudgeon, focused on all the ways the world has hurt him and puts him in jeopardy, begrudging humanity for injuring him and costing him the power of flight. If he could, he’d blast dragonfire over the entire human world. Fire is a great way to express your feelings.

Upperhead (guess where he grows!) is outright delusional, believing he is actually a human being suffering from some traumatic hallucination. Any day now, he’ll snap out of it and the other heads will be gone, and he’ll return to mowing his lawn and eating too much bread.

They spend the opening chapter fighting in a way that will be familiar to some readers. See, I don’t just talk to myself. I argue with myself. My brain isn’t big enough to house all the contradictory opinions banging around in there. They spill out of me. The habit of talking to myself was great practice for being a writer, since writing is just talking to yourself quietly.

A funny thing happens when you literalize this by having multiple contradictory consciousnesses striving for control of a single body. It helps you see how parts of the same person can clash. You also see how they reconcile, and how you only grow when those parts work together. You don’t grow by silencing yourself. You grow in tandem with yourself, both singular and plural.

Garrodigh has been through a lot. He was once a four-headed dragon, but poor Lefty was blown off by a human’s cannon in the same incident that injured their wings. That trauma still echoes through all three of the surviving heads. Losing a part of himself is part of what’s put the rest of him in such strife. What’s made some parts of him seek vengeance, while other parts just want to understand why the humans keep going to war with each other.

There are enormous questions ahead for him. Can he pull himself together enough to face his injuries and possibly fly again someday? Can he trust anyone again? What place does he have in this world?

They’re the sort of questions you could have conflicting opinions about. By asking them, maybe you’ll see some of yourself in a dragon.

The Dragon Has Some Complaints: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books A Million|Bookshop.org

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The Big Idea: Vonda N. McIntyre

Posted on July 15, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      5 Comments

Though the author of The Curve of the World has passed, her story lives on. Her editor, Nisi Shawl, is here to take us through what she believes Vonda N. McIntyre’s Big Idea was. Let’s have a look, and pay our respects in the process.

NISI SHAWL (EDITOR):
We may never truly know what the Big Idea behind Vonda N. McIntyre’s last novel was. Two weeks after she completed a final draft of that novel, The Curve of the World, Vonda died. We can ask ourselves what she was trying to do as many times as we want, but the file drawers full of notes she left behind are empty of the answer to that question.
Vonda wrote change-the-world science fiction. Like her friend, Clarion classmate, and Pacific Northwest neighbor Octavia Butler, she faced life’s challenges head on and with a high-functioning imagination as her tool and weapon, and rigorous research as her resource. Which maybe comes across as a little grim?
But apply all that discipline to speculating about the bull-leaping, bare-breasted matriarchs of long-vanished Minoan civilization and (if you’re Vonda) you get fascinating results: a mind-stretching, 408-page epic. Starting their ocean voyage from the homey Mediterranean waters surrounding the Cretan archipelago, the trade-and-diplomacy-focused crew of the Flying Fish sail halfway around the globe, encountering a sea monster, volcanoes, a mummy king, and slave-driving pirates as the ship makes her way to the North Pacific’s Neah Bay.
Which sounds like your standard adventure tale, right? But what’s so intensely cool about The Curve of the World is how it’s not that. Not standard. Not at all. It’s not a Hero’s Journey-type deal in which our protagonists conquer foreign lands by virtue of their physical might or intellectual superiority or due to some inherent divine right.
Because unlike, for instance, the ostensibly Christian conquistadores claiming ownership of Florida and Mexico and basically half the Western Hemisphere, the Minoans aboard Flying Fish represent a culture based on cooperation, trust, and mutualism. It practiced DEI from the get-go.

My best guess is that this was Vonda’s Big Idea: How would a deeply egalitarian society interact with other sorts of societies? Vonda’s alt-Minoans parlay with bloody-handed Mesoamericans. They trade peacefully with sword-wielding tribes of Amazon warriors. They maintain their fairness, their inclusiveness, their love of interdependence, their core feminist principles, all this in the face of murderous aggression. So that’s what I think it was.
And why should it matter what I think Vonda thought? Well, the way the editorial process for this book went, it matters quite a lot. As author and Aqueduct Press founder L. Timmel Duchamp puts it, I stood “in loco Vondae.”
You see, the manuscript file that gets turned in to a book’s publisher may include the word “final” in its name, but it’s not genuinely final at that point. If you’ve ever had a book you wrote published you know how these things go. The copyeditor has questions about spelling names consistently throughout the text; the managing editor has questions about a character’s locations and travel times. So on and so forth. Aqueduct asked those questions of me.
To me that meant I needed to immerse myself in as much Vonda-ness as I could conjure up. I read and re-read her old and new work. I fondled my eight examples of the beaded sea-creatures she crocheted ceaselessly, gorgeous and glittering creations she generously bestowed upon her family, friends, and fen. And I dallied in memories of meeting her and witnessing firsthand her no-nonsense approach to life, her restaurant recommendations and pronouncements on crows and prowess with video cameras.

Then, faced with page after page of queries about Curve, I did my best to answer as she would have answered and choose as she would have chosen. I did my best to first absorb and then project her voice, and along with everyone else involved, to preserve it.
Maybe if you read The Curve of the World you can tell me whether we got that part right. Is that Vonda talking to you from beyond death? And what about my guess? Is it at all accurate to say that the Big Idea behind this book is how an extremely woke civilization can triumph over violent authoritarians? And is that hope I see really there?

The Curve of the World: Amazon

The Big Idea: Arvind Ethan David

Posted on July 14, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      4 Comments

The world makes up stories and stories make up the world. Author Arvind Ethan David aims to challenge the narrative of some of these stories in the Big Idea for his newest novel, The Great Game. Follow along as he tells you about some of the greats, and questions if they’re really all they’re cracked up to be.

ARVIND ETHAN DAVID:

I Broke into Someone Else’s Universe. Here’s What I Found

In The Great Game, my hero, Balvinder Dev Singh, an Indian war veteran and aspiring British barrister, comes head-to-head with Sherlock Holmes, Winston Churchill and a feral teenager who may or may not be John Clayton, Lord of Greystoke Manor. My intention in the novel was to write an original thriller that was both satisfying in its own right, and perhaps has something interesting to say about empire, colonialism and the canon of British imperial literature. 

Except, I knew I was running the risk that it might also look and sound a lot like fanfiction.

In my writing career so far, I’ve spent a lot of time adapting the work of writers whose work I revere. From Douglas Adams to Raymond Chandler, P. G. Wodehouse, and Neil Gaiman, I’ve been privileged to play in some big, extraordinary universes created by legends. There is nothing like writing in the marginalia of a maestro to force you to raise your game. To write a joke about physics that can stand next to one Douglas Adams wrote, to craft a simile that can hold its own next to Wodehouse, or to describe a dame who Raymond Chandler first described—these are hair-raising, teeth-grinding experiences, and I have the scars from surviving them.

Early in the process of writing the novel, that challenge was made by some who I love and respect — a bestselling author friend and my editor — both of whom suggested that my book might be viewed as less serious or less original because I was borrowing other people’s characters and settings. Basically they said, “folks might think you’re just doing derivative fanfic.”

That was of course not my intention, so I spent a lot of time thinking about it, but ultimately, I had to do what I had to do. To me, the whole point was to play in this particular canon. Here’s why.

Firstly, the idea that borrowing another’s universe is derivative is, it turns out, a comparatively recent convention, born of modern copyright law and perhaps some post-Romantic notion of the lone original genius. For most of the recorded history of literature, it was not the exception but the norm.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a kind of mash-up of all Greek myth. The Arthurian legends are the result of a constantly reinvented mixtape, spun by successive generations of authors and poets — from Chrétien de Troyes in the twelfth century to Malory in the fifteenth, to T. H. White and Lev Grossman in our own era — each reinventing the legend through the prism of their times, none of them having invented the universe they so beautifully inhabited.

Shakespeare, of course, made up almost none of his plots or characters, pillaging history, myth, and the work of other writers indiscriminately and without apology or acknowledgement—and we don’t consider him a less original or serious writer because of it. 

Indeed, if you step back and think about what a story is, it makes total sense. Stories, in evolutionary terms, are the common currency, the shared atmosphere of culture and civilization. From every myth of creation to the excuse you give yourself for being habitually late, stories are the psyche’s scaffolding with which we navigate existence. So, of course, it makes sense that certain myths, certain stories become pervasive in our culture and, once pervasive, prove more, not less, fertile ground in which new narratives can be planted.

I would argue that imperial adventure fiction—the breadth of writing from Rudyard Kipling and H.G. Wells, via Arthur Conan Doyle to Edgar Rice Burroughs—is one such mythic narrative. It is larger than any single author and larger than any single character, but the characters who inhabit it remain, a century or more since their birth, powerful and potent in our collective imagination: Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Mowgli, Kim, Captain Nemo.

The reason is that this body of work shares one animating instinct: to glamorize and justify, explain and contextualize the imperial system—the system that enabled Britain to create and maintain its empire with sword and fire for almost 200 years. Edward Said made this argument best in Orientalism. This is not to suggest that every author or every character was an ardent imperialist, although Kipling certainly was.

Today, whilst the British Empire has come and gone, the notion of empire remains an animating instinct in our global political moment, whether we speak of the American hegemon in decline, China in ascendance, or the dangerous death throes of the Russian bear. That is why these stories remain as potent and resonant as ever.

In The Great Game, I’m having a conversation with this tradition, interrogating the canon and asking the question: can the form of the imperialist adventure mystery hold when inhabited by a brown protagonist, by a colonial subject standing in its center and taking on its titans with his own ferocious rage and questioning intelligence?

For example, I have a scene in which Balvinder confronts Dr. Watson by pointing out that his account of The Sign of the Four displays appalling ignorance about India and Indians—that the orient and orientals in these adventure stories are always treated as the object, as the other, never as the subject and certainly not as the hero. Which doesn’t make them less good stories, just more blinkered ones.

I’m also asking whether I, as a brown author, as a person of color who enters the canon from the outside—who has always loved Sherlock unthinkingly as a child but now finds that loved tainted by the realization that the order that Sherlock seeks to uphold is the order of the Empire — can write a story that both honors the great detective and holds him accountable? 

If I contribute to the canon, have I changed what the canon is, introducing a few drops of my own seven percent solution of decolonization into an imperialist mix?

I don’t know, inject it and see.

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The Big Idea: Jo Miles

Posted on July 10, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

How many weeds do you have to whack before the weeds tell you to knock it off? In author Jo Miles new sci-fi novel, there might be more than meets the eye to a stubborn, vegetation filled planet. Grab a machete and hack your way through the Big Idea for The Final Chronicle of Yeneh.

JO MILES:

The Final Chronicle of Yeneh is a science fiction story that’s a love letter to portal fantasies, for all of us cynical grownups who secretly miss that sense of wonder in our lives.

When you were a kid, did you ever go looking for portals to other worlds in your home, in old wardrobes and little-used closets? I did. At a certain age, after tearing through the Narnia series, I searched every corner of my (extremely normal, suburban) house. Spoiler: I didn’t find anything. But that daydream of finding my way into a more magical world never fully left me.

A little older, I fell in love with Star Trek, and started to dream about traveling the stars to discover strange new worlds and new forms of life. I soon learned that visiting other stars wasn’t going to happen during my lifetime, and training to be an astronaut sounded like way too much work, anyway. So I wrote stories instead.

Two separate genres. Two kinds of wondrous new worlds. As a writer, I got intrigued by the parallels between them—but couldn’t ignore the problematic parts that went over my younger self’s head.

Why exactly did the people of Narnia, freed from their evil queen, now need four British school children to rule over them? Were none of them up to the task of forming a government?

And as those new planets got terraformed and colonized, what happened to the life already there, that weird, gloriously alien nature?

I set out to write a book about the problems of terraforming and space colonization, and the possibilities of undoing that harm—rewilding in space. But The Final Chronicle of Yeneh found its heart when I connected those themes to the sense of wonder from portal fantasy.

The main character, Ada, is helping to terraform her family’s new planet and bemoaning the viciously resilient local plant life when a visiting scientist starts asking pesky questions about those “plants.” Could there be more to them than these colonizers think?

Ada doesn’t want to see any problems that might interfere with her family’s new enterprise, but as the scientist pushes her for access to study them, she starts to see inexplicable similarities between the native life on this planet and the beloved portal fantasies that she grew up on, written by her own ancestor (the in-world series called The Chronicles of Yeneh; hence my book’s title). She discovers that her family has committed serious wrongs stretching far back in their history across two planets. As her grandfather pushes toward terraforming the native life out of existence, Ada has some hard decisions to make.

In the process, though, Ada gets the adventure that she dreamed of as a little girl. She gets to explore her own magical new world, full of wonder and delight despite the darkness. And she makes friends, both with new life forms and with the visiting scientist who forces her to see to what’s happening in front of her.

I wanted the native beings, the yeneheh, to be appropriately wondrous, too. I love a truly alien alien, one that the human characters struggle to understand, but the best first contact stories show how we can bridge that gap. We humans don’t have a great track record of recognizing intelligence that operates differently than our own, or even different styles of intelligence within our own species. Terraforming an alien planet that’s “just” full of “plants” could easily mean wiping out an intelligence that we simply don’t recognize yet.

I was conscious, as colonization grew into a bigger and bigger theme, that this story could easily get preachy. Or it could be a real downer. I didn’t want that. Yes, Ada needs to take responsibility and make amends for her family’s wrongdoing, but I stayed focused on making this an ode to the stories I loved as a child—portal fantasies like Narnia, and strange new worlds like Star Trek—while taking on the complications I can see in them as an adult.

Writing The Final Chronicle of Yeneh helped me reawaken a sense of wonder, discovery, and empathy that can be in short supply these days, and wrapped it up with a sense of justice. I hope it does the same for you.

The Final Chronicle of Yeneh: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powells|Horned Lark Press 

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The Big Idea: Bryan Gruley

Posted on July 9, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi

“Innocent until proven guilty” isn’t always as black and white as it may seem in some cases. Author Bryan Gruley takes a look at what happens when other factors are at play in a seemingly open and shut case of murder. Plunge into the icy depths of the Big Idea for his newest novel, River Deep.

BRYAN GRULEY:

In the middle of a northern Michigan winter, a young mother drives into a river, drowning her twin infant boys.

My God. Why?

Was she drunk? Or drugged? Or both? Was she under intense stress? Was the father complicit? Did she have a reason, however misguided, to plunge into that freezing water? If she was at the steering wheel, is she guilty regardless of countervailing circumstances?

I didn’t know the answer to any of these questions when I put Catriona Dulaney into the Jako River outside little Bitterfrost, Michigan, at the start of my novel, River Deep. And I worried that, however my story answered those questions, Catriona would inevitably repel readers. After all, how can a normal person empathize with someone who is at least partially if not totally, maybe even intentionally, responsible for the deaths of helpless children? Why impose on readers the burden of relating to such a reprehensible character?

Catriona’s story was inspired, if that’s the word, by a 1989 case involving a man named DeLisle who drove his wife and four children into the Detroit River, drowning the kids. I was a reporter at The Detroit News in Washington, D.C., at the time, and read with great interest my colleagues’ stories about how DeLisle confessed to the crime and was sentenced to life in prison.

More than thirty years later, I revisited the case as I was conjuring an idea for a new novel. I read about DeLisle in Blood on the Mitten, an anthology of Michigan murders by Tom Carr, and did some additional digging of my own. Even after 2020, I learned, DeLisle was still appealing his conviction on grounds that his confession was coerced. He had previously struck me as a pathetic sort, unwilling to accept any responsibility for what happened. But as I read the appellate pleadings, I focused more and more on the motivations and behavior of the law-enforcement people who nudged the hapless DeLisle to the precipice. They professed to be seeking truth but acted more like they were stalking a guilty verdict. Maybe DeLisle, I thought, and by extension, Catriona Dulaney, weren’t the only bad guys in the story. I wondered whether such a character could be relatable and, just as important, compelling?

The answer, at least initially, was no. When I delivered a first draft of River Deep to Laurie Johnson, my editor at Severn House, I didn’t know that she, like Catriona, was the mother of twins. Laurie was, shall we say, highly sensitive to my portrayal of the woman standing trial for the murder of her sons, Liam and Logan. In her editorial comments, Laurie said Catriona’s outlook on her children’s deaths “comes across as cold. She doesn’t even seem numb … and so she runs the risk of losing sympathy with the reader. It’s crucial that we see some form of emotional journey from Cat, so that by the time of the court case, readers are invested in her–even if she admits she’s guilty.”

Laurie’s assertion resonated with me, though not right away. Initially I thought, if Catriona admits she’s guilty, the story is over, isn’t it? I was mistaken, but only after thousands of words in rewrite did I see how and why. What mother who lost two eight-month-old children wouldn’t feel somehow responsible, even if she wasn’t involved? Whether she is deemed guilty or not guilty by a jury of her peers, might not she nevertheless assume every tincture of blame she could soak up? As if a guilty verdict would be beside the point. And then, what reader couldn’t muster compassion for this mother and the shadow that will follow her to her grave?

I wrote through the entire novel with these questions and their possible answers in mind, dropping in details, dialogue, and a bit of back story that I hoped would close the emotional gap between Catriona and readers. I rewrote the last half-dozen chapters of the book and had both Catriona and Devyn confront the matter of Catriona’s relative guilt or innocence head on. Only readers can decide how well or even whether I succeeded, but when I finished, I was at peace with the character, even if she wasn’t entirely at peace with herself.

River Deep: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Horizon Books (Bryan’s hometown bookstore; signed/personalized copies available)

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Read an excerpt: First Chapter of RIVER DEEP

The Big Idea: Haralambi Markov

Posted on July 8, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      1 Comment

Death is a rather big part of life, so it makes sense that author Haralambi Markov kept writing about it, whether that was intentional on his part or not. In the Big Idea for his newest collection of short stories, Markov talks about his own experience with mental illness and death that contributed to this horrific yet strangely hopeful collection titled The Language of Knives.

HARALAMBI MARKOV:

“You want to die.”

That’s the first thing a friend of mine told me after reading the first stories I’d written. We were in high school at the time. The second thing he told me is that I shouldn’t write in English before learning how to do it in Bulgarian, because that’s my mother tongue. He was a writer as well, although he wrote literary fiction and listened to Mozart. I respected him a lot at the time, which is probably why I took great offense at both statements and chose to ignore him. 

I continued to write in English—definitely the right decision, although there’s a whole separate essay to be written about the difference in my approach to writing in two different languages—and I mostly tried to forget the comment about death. But I couldn’t really shake it off. Not when I consistently return to death and dying as themes in my work, even when I was trying to write science fiction and fantasy. The whole conceit of “The Language of Knives,” the title story in my collection, is the meticulous rendering of a body to blood, bone, and meat before being presented as cake to the Gods to be granted entry into the afterlife. The transition to horror and weird fiction happened on its own without much of a conscious choice.

Over the years, I developed deep bouts of depression. I’ve been diagnosed with bipolar II disorder for about seven years now, but have been living with it for far longer, and until my medication started working, I really, really wanted to die. If I have to summarize the big idea behind my collection, as much as my body of work over the past decade can have one, it would be the horror of existing and how one deals with an enormous death drive.

I didn’t realize I was fantasizing about my own death until much later, when I first experienced serious depression. It felt very hopeless, and much of my university years were filled with suicidal ideation. You find some of the weight of that in my story “Nine Tongues Tell of,” where the protagonist Damyana willingly follows a halla—a predatory weather spirit—to its lair, even if that means death rather than facing the prospect of yet another bleak day. Similarly, Lazar from “The Town the Forest Ate” finds himself alone in a cursed forest at night, compelled by a samodiva to skin himself alive. A terrible fate for sure, but also a quick escape from a curse placed upon his entire town. 

Both stories view surrender to death as cathartic. Death is the ultimate liberation from life that feels like an inescapable trap. I don’t think I was consciously writing about my own death, but felt such relief upon finishing each story. I found joy in the symbolic death through botanical transformation in “When Raspberries Bloom in August”; self-acceptance in the body horror of “Holding Hands with Monsters,” where my protagonist chooses to become a monster after being visited by one each night for years; and reconciliation with the past as my protagonist faced extinction in the eco-horror of “Convalescence.”

A lie I maintained until as recently as arranging the stories in my manuscript was that my writing was not autobiographical. Very much not true. Reading the book, to me personally, felt like I was trying to work out how to be for the past thirteen years. All the ways I metaphorically experienced death through my characters became all my attempts to live and make a life worth living. A crucial moment in “The Drowning Line” has my protagonist confront and overcome the ghost of an ancestor, who has made each member of his bloodline drown in the place where he was drowned centuries ago. Similarly, in “Baba Yaga Helps Build a House,” Hristian overcomes his grandmother, Baba Yaga, and earns a new beginning. In “Swallow,” my protagonist summons the ghost of his deceased father, also a medium, and is able to leave an abusive relationship. Yes, there’s death and carnage, but that’s on par for the genre. The point is that the latter portion of my collection contains hope that there is an after and it’s better than what was before. 

I’ve been in remission for a year and seven months, and before that, have done remarkably better in my thirties than in my twenties. To my high-school friend, I concede. You were right, but I am thrilled to say that your assessment is not true anymore.

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The Big Idea: April Dávila

Posted on July 7, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      4 Comments

The action of writing does not require artistry, but the artistry of writing requires action. That action being sitting down and actually doing it, even if it is hard. Writing coach April Dávila is here today to introduce some new methods that are sure to get you focused and motivated so that you can, as her book is titled, Sit Write Here.

APRIL DÁVILA:

What Chopping Onions Taught Me About Writing

As a writing coach, I’ve spent the last several years working to convince writers that we can do hard things (like finish a novel) without all the agonizing. My conviction on this point stems from an experience I had many years ago with a big pile of onions, which sounds odd, I know, but allow me to explain. 

In 2009, I attended my first week-long silent meditation retreat. The only respite from the unending quiet was a daily talk given by the instructors. One afternoon, the lecture was about how mindfulness can help us discern between pain and suffering and I was not getting it. Pain and suffering. One follows the other like day follows night. To be in pain is to suffer. I suffer when I’m in pain. End of story.

After the talk, I walked down to the kitchen for work duty. Every attendee at the retreat had a chore, and I’d volunteered, along with five other silent meditators, to help chop vegetables for dinner. The head cook poured out a box of onions and told us to start dicing.

I wasn’t done cutting the first onion when my eyes began to sting. As I started in on the second onion, tears streamed down my face. The woman beside me sniffled. The man across the table turned away, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. Pretty soon I could hardly see. My eyes burned and the discomfort edged into real pain, and yet I found myself giggling at the absurdity of us all standing there crying over our cutting boards.

One by one, the other choppers started to chuckle too. We stood there with tears streaming down our faces, laughing and turning away to catch our breath, to blink away the sting, to try and compose ourselves. With no success.

Then it struck me: the pain was real. My eyes genuinely hurt. But I was not suffering. I was, in fact, having fun.

Had I been in a different, less aware state of mind, I might have spun up a story about how I’m just not cut out for kitchen work. The tears could have confirmed that it was too hard, too painful. I might have quit. Instead, I kept right on dicing, tittering with my fellow yogis as we tried to cut onions we could barely see.

As a writer, I think about those onions a lot.

Because here’s the thing about writing: it is genuinely hard. And here’s the real kicker: writing only gets more challenging as you get better at it. Before I cared about diction and imagery and precision of language, I could slap together any few thousand words on instinct and call it a story. 

These days I take the time to whittle away at ideas until the words on the page actually say what I mean. That requires deep focus, real effort, and sitting with a lot of uncertainty. It’s hard, and (especially when difficult feedback or rejection comes into the picture, as it inevitably will for all writers) it can even be painful.

You can tell yourself that the pain is a sign that you’re just not cut out to be a writer, that it’s too hard and maybe you should quit. You can bow down to that little voice in your head saying you’re not a real writer, this is going nowhere, you should be doing something useful. Or you can recognize those thoughts as your brain’s natural response to discomfort, then carry on and keep writing.

Learning to observe your thoughts without getting hijacked by them (which is essentially what meditation trains you to do) is tremendously helpful when it comes to sitting with a difficult scene, quieting the inner critic long enough to get a first draft down, and recognizing the difference between “I’m stuck” and “I’m anxious about what people will think if I put this idea on the page.”

My book, Sit Write Here, is a practical guide to using mindfulness meditation to write more and suffer less. Not to write more easily (necessarily) but to stop adding unnecessary anguish on top of an already demanding craft. In each chapter I pair a meditation practice with a stage in the writing process, from getting the first draft done, to surfing the waves of accolades and criticisms. 

If you’ve ever struggled with writer’s block, if you tend to beat yourself up for not writing more, or if you want to write more compelling prose in fewer drafts, this book is for you. Agonizing over our writing is a habit. And like all habits, it can be changed.

You can do this hard, beautiful thing. Probably without crying.

Though if onions are involved, all bets are off.

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