Aug 18, 2022
What I Wish I Knew As a Younger Writer
For our Application Week series, Sari Botton on writing for trade publications and what advice she wished she had received.
Sari Botton is the author of the memoir in essays, And You May Find Yourself...Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. She is a contributing editor at Catapult, and the former Essays Editor for Longreads. She edited the bestselling anthologies Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NewYork and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. She teaches creative nonfiction at Catapult, Bay Path University and Kingston Writers' Studio. She publishes Oldster Magazine, Memoir Monday, and Adventures in Journalism.
Photo credit to Sylvie Rosokoff
For our Application Week series, Sari Botton on writing for trade publications and what advice she wished she had received.
“For me, getting better as a writer is learning how to get to the essence of things and boil down all of that exposition and backstory.”
At last, I took my teachers’ and mentors’ advice, and scrutinized my own behavior more than anyone else’s.
“I think I’m trying to reconcile the need to write and have a deadline with the need to be a human? And right now, the human is winning.”
“I know that when I’m really writing, when I’m really, really lost in a sentence, I forget I have a body, I forget what time is. I forget to eat.”
“I always battle with the realization that the stuff I write doesn’t need to exist, and I wonder how many people actually want to read the horror and speculative fiction that I write.”
Sometimes I thought of it as war reparations. On the outwardly civil but quietly vicious battlefield of my parents’ divorce, I had been the clear loser.
