Writing philosophy

Craft notes, mostly for myself — on how the noticing turns into the writing, and what I try not to do along the way.

The notebook comes first

Nothing gets written well from memory. I carry a paper notebook everywhere — smells, overheard fragments, the exact way someone folds a dumpling — and trust almost nothing I didn't write down within the hour. The finished essays are built from these notes months later; the rawer, unedited version of the same habit is what fills the notebook page of this site.

Attention is the whole job

I don't think good food-and-travel writing is really about good sentences, though I care about those too. It's about noticing the detail that everyone else in the room let pass — the hand gesture, the pause before an answer, the dish nobody thought to explain because to them it needs no explaining. The sentences are just how you hand that attention to someone else.

Revision as second travel

I rewrite a piece the way I'd revisit a place: not to fix what's broken so much as to see what I missed the first time through. The best edits usually come from admitting a paragraph is doing the easy thing — describing what happened — instead of the harder one, which is explaining what it meant.

Failure, kept in

The wrong turn, the meal that disappointed, the interview that went nowhere — I try to leave these in rather than edit them out for a tidier arc. A trip that goes exactly as planned rarely produces anything worth reading; more on that in on travel.

Whose story it is

The hardest discipline is remembering the story usually isn't mine. My job is to get close enough to notice clearly and far enough back to let the people I'm writing about speak for themselves — a line I try to hold, imperfectly, in every piece on the writing page.