I write fiction. Not for a living. For the reason most people who write fiction write it: because the worlds I want to spend time in don't exist until I make them. You learn things about real life by making up unreal worlds. This sounds backwards. It is not. The made-up worlds are the way some truths about real life are easiest to see. And some are not visible any other way. How fiction holds the mirror The mirror metaphor is old and a little tired. The reason it survives is

Writing fiction taught me something I did not expect. The discipline of making something out of nothing changes how the rest of your life feels. Not because the thing you make is good. The thing you make is mostly bad. Especially in the beginning, especially in your own opinion. The change is in the act of making. This is about why a creative practice matters, written from someone who started one and kept going. What a creative practice is A creative practice is a thing you d

Most writing I see in business is fast writing. LinkedIn posts drafted in eight minutes. Sales emails sent in two. Decks built the night before the meeting. Memos written in the gap between calls. The output looks fine and reads fine and disappears within a week. The writing that actually moves something forward looks different. It takes longer. Sometimes much longer. A 500-word client memo I'm proud of took four hours and three rewrites. The decks that close deals at Diagona