A listener named Lita who grew up in Cuba shares her favorite Spanish idiom for “working hard”: sudando tinta, or literally, “sweating ink.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Sweating Ink” We had a voicemail from Lita...
A 1905 letter from Virginia Woolf offers comfort to anyone who lacks confidence in their own work. As a young, would-be writer, Woolf herself expressed doubt about her own abilities. It would be another 23 years before she published her...
A profile in The New Yorker of writer Patricia Lockwood, author of Will There Ever Be Another You (Bookshop|Amazon) opens by saying she has “the impish verve and provocative guilelessness of a peeing cupid,” a description the quirky author herself...
Iranian-American poet Solmaz Sharif once observed that “The duty of the writer…is to remind us that we will die. And that we aren’t dead yet.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Duty of the Writer” I...
Books were rare treasures in the Middle Ages, painstakingly copied out by hand. So how to protect them from theft? Scribes sometimes added a curse to the first page of those books that was supposed to keep thieves away — and some were as vicious as...
Wise advice from author Zadie Smith: Put your manuscript in a drawer until you become its reader rather than its writer. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Become Your Work’s Reader” Here’s some excellent...