How I Write Highlights, Plus an Ask

A snow day dispatch

Hello from New York! And hello from my tiny living room, where I’m going to be all day because it’s snowing like crazy and I was going to see The Great Gatsby musical tonight but it was cancelled.

I have three interviews scheduled for this week but because I’m an A-grade procrastinator, I did no prep whatsoever and spent the morning making some highlight clips instead. If you said, “Hey David, what are the best parts of recent episodes?” these are the links I’d send your way:

• Steven Pressfield: The female carries the mystery

• Ezra Klein: Writers who outsource their research to AI operate on a flawed model of how the mind works

• Elif Shafak: Why you should read fiction

• Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar (Train Dreams screenwriter and director): How to create a beautiful movie scene

And also, I want to learn more about who’s listening to How I Write. What kind of writing do you do? What do you like about the show? And how can I make it better? So I threw together a little survey.

Here it is.

Mind taking a few minutes to fill it out?

Thanks for listening (and recommending the show to your friends). There are some seriously cool episodes in the pipeline with novelists and screenwriters and poets, and all kinds of other writers.

— David